Joachim Hertzberg

Erich Rome

Georg Dorffner

Today’s mobile robot perception is insu?cient for acting goal-directedly in - constrained, dynamic everyday environments like a home, a factory, or a city. Subject to restrictions in bandwidth, computer power, and computation time, a robot has to react to a wealth of dynamically changing stimuli in such - vironments, requiring rapid, selective attention to decisive, action-relevant - formation of high current utility. Robust and general engineering methods for e?ectively and e?ciently coupling perception, action, and reasoning are unava- able. Interesting performance, if any, is currently only achieved by sophisticated robot programming exploiting domain features and specialties, which leaves - dinary users no chance of changing how the robot acts. The latter facts are high barriers for introducing, for example, service robots into human living or work environments. In order to overcome these barriers, additonal R&D e?orts are required. The European Commission is undert- ing a determined e?ort to fund related basic, inter-disciplinary research in a line of Strategic Objectives, including the Cognitive Systems calls in their 6th Framework Programme (FP6, [1]), and continuing in the 7th Framework P- gramme.OneofthefundedCognitiveSystemsprojectsisMACS(“multi-sensory autonomous cognitive systems interacting with dynamic environments for p- ceiving and using a?ordances”).

International Seminar, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, June 5-9, 2006, Revised Papers

Towards Affordance-Based Robot Control

Today’s mobile robot perception is insufficient for acting goal-directedly in unconstrained, dynamic everyday environments like a home, a factory, or a city. Subject to restrictions in bandwidth, computer power, and computation time, a robot has to react to a wealth of dynamically changing stimuli in such environments, requiring rapid, selective attention to decisive, action-relevant information of high current utility. Robust and general engineering methods for effectively and efficiently coupling perception, action and reasoning are unavailable. Interesting performance, if any, is currently only achieved by sophisticated robot programming exploiting domain features and specialties, which leaves ordinary users no chance of changing how the robot acts. The purpose of this volume - outcome of a GI-Dagstuhl Seminar held in Dagstuhl Castle in June 2006 - is to give a first overview on the concept of affordances for the design and implementation of autonomous mobile robots acting goal-directedly in a dynamic environment. The aim is to develop affordance-based control as a method for robotics. The potential of this new methodology will be shown by going beyond navigation-like tasks towards goaldirected autonomous manipulation in the project demonstrators.

Kurt Hornik

Horst Bischof

This book is based on the papers presented at the International Conference on Arti?cial Neural Networks, ICANN 2001, from August 21–25, 2001 at the - enna University of Technology, Austria. The conference is organized by the A- trian Research Institute for Arti?cal Intelligence in cooperation with the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Group and the Center for Computational - telligence at the Vienna University of Technology. The ICANN conferences were initiated in 1991 and have become the major European meeting in the ?eld of neural networks. From about 300 submitted papers, the program committee selected 171 for publication. Each paper has been reviewed by three program committee m- bers/reviewers. We would like to thank all the members of the program comm- tee and the reviewers for their great e?ort in the reviewing process and helping us to set up a scienti?c program of high quality. In addition, we have invited eight speakers; three of their papers are also included in the proceedings. We would like to thank the European Neural Network Society (ENNS) for their support. We acknowledge the ?nancial support of Austrian Airlines, A- trian Science Foundation (FWF) under the contract SFB 010, Austrian Society ̈ for Arti?cial Intelligence (OGAI), Bank Austria, and the Vienna Convention Bureau. We would like to express our sincere thanks to A. Flexer, W. Horn, K. Hraby, F. Leisch, C. Schittenkopf, and A. Weingessel. The conference and the proceedings would not have been possible without their enormous contri- tion.

International Conference Vienna, Austria, August 21-25, 2001 Proceedings

Artificial Neural Networks - ICANN 2001

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks,ICANN 2001, held in Vienna, Austria in August 2001. The 171 revised papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from around 300 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on data analysis and pattern recognition, theory, kernel methods, topographic mapping, independent component analysis, signal processing, time series processing, agent-based economic modeling, selforganization and dynamical systems, robotics and control, vision and image processing, computational neuroscience, and connectionist and cognitive science.

Georg Dorffner

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