Providing robots with problem awareness skills

Humanoid robots operating in the real world must exhibit very complex behaviors, such as object manipulation or interaction with people. Such capabilities pose the problem of being able to reason on a huge number of different objects, places and actions to carry out, each one relevant for achieving robot goals. This article proposes a functional representation of objects, places and actions described in terms of affordances and capabilities. Everyday problems can be efficiently dealt with by decomposing the reasoning process in two phases, namely problem awareness (which is the focus of this article) and action selection.