Perceiving inanimate objects The PlayMate must be able to perceive the inanimate parts of its environment as collections of surfaces/shapes that are segmented from the background and collected into objects. This process should also provide the position of the objects in 3D space. This process may used active vision to gather more information about the scene. This leads to non-perceptual requirements described in space-control-issues and non-spatial-thinking. Beyond this it will be useful for the PlayMate to be able recognise objects as being members of particular categories.
For the end of CoSy we will restrict the inanimate objects in the PlayMate's environment to a set defined by the overlap of the set of objects that have structures that vision can extract in 3D and the set of objects that can be manipulated by our arm. We will assume that all our objects are made of the same, rigid, stuff at first. We may add one deformable or flexible type of stuff to this. We also reserve the right to initially select inanimate objects that are easily processed by vision.