Function and appearance-based emergence of object concepts through affordances

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2010

Öğrenci: İLKAY ATIL

Eş Danışman: SİNAN KALKAN, EROL ŞAHİN

Özet:

One view to cognition is that the symbol manipulating brain interprets the symbols of language based on the sensori-motor experiences of the agent. Such symbols, for example, what we refer to as nouns and verbs, are generalizations that the agent discovers through interactions with the environment. Given that an important subset of nouns correspond to objects (and object concepts), in this thesis, how function and appearance-based object concepts can be created through a ffordances has been studied. For this, a computational system, which is able to create object concepts through simple interactions with the objects in the environment, is proposed. Namely, the robot applies a set of built-in behaviors (such as pushing, lifting, grasping) on a set of objects to learn their a ordances, through which objects aff ording similar functions are grouped into object concepts. Moreover, the thesis demonstrates that the discovered object concepts are beneficial for learning new tasks by analyzing the learning performance of learning a new task with and without object concepts.