Sharing gaze control in a robotic system

Abstract

The use of the vision in humans is a source of inspiration for many research works in robotics. Attention mechanisms has received much of this effort, however, aspects such as gaze control and modular composition of vision capabilities have been much less analyzed. This paper describes the architecture of an active vision system that has been conceived to ease the concurrent utilization of the system by several visual tasks. We describe in detail the functional architecture of the system and provide several solutions to the problem of sharing the visual attention when several visual tasks need to be interleaved. The system's design hides this complexity to client processes that can be designed as if they were exclusive users of the visual system. Besides, software engineering principles for design and integration, often forgotten in this kind of developments, have been considered. Some preliminary results on a real robotic platform are also provided. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.