  Affordances are key attributes of what must be perceived by an autonomous
robotic agent in order to effectively interact with novel objects.
Historically, the concept derives from the literature in psychology and
cognitive science, where affordances are discussed in a way that makes it hard
for the definition to be directly transferred to computational specifications
useful for robots. This review article is focused specifically on robotics, so
we discuss the related literature from this perspective. In this survey, we
classify the literature and try to find common ground amongst different
approaches with a view to application in robotics. We propose a categorisation
based on the level of prior knowledge that is assumed to build the relationship
among different affordance components that matter for a particular robotic
task. We also identify areas for future improvement and discuss possible
directions that are likely to be fruitful in terms of impact on robotics
practice.
