PLANNING FOCUS OF ATTENTION FOR MULTIFINGERED HAND WITH CONSIDERATIONOF TIME-VARYING ASPECTS

Visual monitoring of an object manipulated by a multifingered hand has a problem of occlusion caused by the fingers. In this paper, we propo se a new planning method, based on a 3-dimensional CAD model of the en vironment, for focusing attention in such a monitoring task. We formul ate the planning to focus attention as a scheduling problem for the wh ole task period rather than for a specific time. We introduce a geneti c algorithm to cope with combinatorial explosion of the image features considered during time-sequential aspects in the task. The genetic al gorithm is a population-based search method which efficiently finds so lutions in a large search space by simulating biological evolutionary processes. The algorithm consists of selection, crossover, and mutatio n procedures applied to a population of chromosomes. To solve the prob lem of planning a focus of attention by using the genetic algorithm, w e employ a coding scheme for a chromosome to produce consistent offspr ing after the crossover. Experimental results show the usefulness of t he proposed method by finding the pseudo-optimal plan within a short c omputation time. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.