Affordances and Affordance Space: A Conceptual Framework for the Application in Social Robotics Felix LINDNER 1 and Carola ESCHENBACH Knowledge and Language Processing Group Department for Informatics, University of Hamburg, Germany Abstract. Socially aware robots have to coordinate their actions considering the spatial requirements of the humans with whom they interact. We propose a general framework based on the notion of affordances that generalizes geometrical accounts to the problem of human-aware placement of robot activities. The framework pro- vides a conceptual instrument to take into account the heterogeneous abilities and affordances of humans, robots, and environmental entities. We discuss how affor- dance knowledge can be used in various reasoning tasks relevant to human-robot interaction. Keywords. Affordances, Abilities, Socially Aware Robots, Social Spaces, Shared Space Introduction Gibson [1] introduced the notion of affordance as the central concept of ecological psy- chology. According to him, affordances are the possibilities for actions the environment offers to agents in cases where the abilities of agents and properties of the environment match. For example, chairs afford sitting to humans, stairs afford climbing to many hu- mans, but form obstacles for many types of robots and for humans in wheelchairs, and some types of ramps afford climbing to both humans and robots. Both humans and robots also provide affordances to other humans and robots, thereby enabling interaction with other agents. The concept of affordance has inspired several researchers in various dis- ciplines such as psychology [2,3,4], human-computer interaction [5], geographic infor- mation systems [6,7], and robotics [8,9,10,11,12], just to name a few. In philosophy, the notion of affordances has been related to phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty [13]. From the perspective of affordance theorists, there is meaning in the world (i.e., affordances) and therefore agents can act. This is complementary to the view taken by some phenome- nologists, viz., agents can act and therefore the world is meaningful [13]. Traditionally, in robotics, the notion of affordances is related to the action possibili- ties of a single agent (e.g., [8]). However, if agents have to coordinate their actions, tak- 1 lindner@informatik.uni-hamburg.de Thanks to Johanna Seibt and Klaus Robering for discussions about affordances and affordance spaces in the context of the project ‘Making Space’.