Affordance estimation for vision-based object replacement on a humanoid robot

In this paper, we address the problem of finding replacements of missing objects, involved in the execution of manipulation tasks. Our approach is based on estimating functional affordances for the unknown objects in order to propose replacements. We use a vision-based affordance estimation system utilizing object-wise global features and a multi-label learning method. This method also associates confidence values to the estimated affordances. We evaluate our approach on kitchen-related manipulation affordances. The evaluation also includes testing different scenarios for training the system using large-scale datasets. The results indicate that the system is able to successfully predict the affordances of novel objects. We also implement our system on a humanoid robot and demonstrate the affordance estimation in a real scene.