Tool Use: Building Canis Habilis

Speaker:
Robert St. Amant

Abstract:

Research in animal behavior and cognition offers a significant and yet (with a few prominent exceptions) untapped source of ideas for work in artificial intelligence. My research focuses on tool use, activities carried out by humans and a wide range of animal species; our goal is to build embodied agents with general tool-using abilities. In cross-disciplinary work of this kind, it is important to establish a common language. We have developed a definition of animal tool use that guides our work:

Tool use is the exertion of control over a freely manipulable external object (the tool) with the goal of (1) altering the physical properties of another object, substance, surface, or medium (the target, which may be the tool user or another organism) via a dynamic mechanical interaction, or (2) mediating the flow of information between the tool user and the environment or other organisms in the environment.

My talk will be in two parts. In the first part, I motivate this definition and discuss why we believe it is preferable to existing definitions of tool use. In the second part, I describe our work in three areas of tool use: the representation of visual affordances in terms of symmetry relationships between agents, tools, and objects; the role of computational imagery in goal-directed use of tools; and our preliminary thoughts concerning interaction semantics.

References:
Revisiting the Definition of Animal Tool Use
Under review. (NCSU Computer Science Technical Report TR-2007-16)
Robert St. Amant and Thomas E. Horton

Tool Use for Autonomous Agents
Proceedings AAAI '05
Robert St. Amant and Alexander B. Wood