  Understanding object and its context are very important for robots when
dealing with objects for completion of a mission. In this paper, an
Affordance-based Ontology (ABO) is proposed for easy robot dealing with
substantive and non-substantive objects. An ABO is a machine-understandable
representation of objects and their relationships by what it's related to and
how it's related. By using ABO, when dealing with a substantive object, robots
can understand the representation of its object and its relation with other
non-substantive objects. When the substantive object is not available, the
robots have the understanding ability, in term of objects and their functions
to select a non substantive object in order to complete the mission, such as
giving raincoat or hat instead of getting stuck due to the unavailability of
substantive object, e.g. umbrella. The experiment is done in the Ubiquitous
Robotics Technology (u-RT) Space of National Institute of Advanced Industrial
Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan.
