Abstract
From the viewpoint of the Affordance Theory advocated by J. J. Gibson, an ecological approach for realizing artificial skills is presented in contrast to the conventional paradigm of behavior-based robots known as “sense, think and act”.A perception-driven robot demonstrates the usefulness of the ecological approach through the assembly task of mating several parts on a plane. Instead of action-rules based on sensory information, the proposed robot employs a kind of oscillator, Action Pattern Generator (APG), for taking active action before perception. The limitations of the simple robot, the actions of which are dominated by APG, are also discussed. Then, in order to compensate APG for lack of the rationality in choosing actions, two types of memories, namely Working Memory (WM) and Episodic Memory (EM), are introduced into the robot's brain. Consequently, the perception-driven robot has the abilities to distinguish the shapes of various parts, mount them in right places, and stop its motion automatically.
