Robotic perception of dwelling: threshhold of thinking machines

The contribution of this paper is the introduction of an abstract sensor-actuator pair to the subsumption architecture of robots introduced by Brooks (1987). The perceiving side of this pair derives from Gibson´s (1979) affordance, which is a form of grasping of situations involving perceived objects. This study is part of a new form of evolutionary robotics called cognitive robotics. It considers a new context for a classical form of learning, namely, habitation. The inspiration for the form of affordances described in this paper comes from Heidegger´s (1982) notion of the convergence of the concurrent activities of building, dwelling and thinking. In some sense, building and dwelling are at the threshhold of thinking. A brief description of the form and functioning of abstract S-A pairs is given