Affordance-Based Planning for Assisting Humans in Daily Activities

The focus of the present work is on daily activity planning, i.e., representations and algorithms able to produce a course of action to deal efficiently with problems of daily living. To achieve this, the article proposes a functional representation of everyday objects, places and actions described in terms of affordances. Its contributions are two--fold: (i) it proposes to represent affordances and capabilities as regions in a proper affordance and capability space, and to describe such regions using neural maps; (ii) it proposes to decompose the planning process into different activities, by introducing a phase referred to as Problem Awareness preceding Action Planning, which allows to reduce the planning space in order to tackle large-scale planning problems.