On perceptual advantages of active robot vision

For a long time it was known that motion control of both head and eyes is a strategic aspect of human visual perception. Despite the continuous shifts and often sudden changes of the gaze direction, this capability guarantees stable and effective 3D perception, even in case of ambiguities and relati ve motion between the observer and the external objects. The article consid ers a robotic vision system, with an anthropomorphic kinematic structure, a nd proposes a formal characterization of the perceptual advantages related to the active control of the cameras. It is shown that movement of the came ras, besides providing computational and behavioral advantages, is essentia l to gather optimal measurements. In particular, the control objective of t he eye-head system is related to a quality measure function describing the sensitivity of the transformation from world to camera coordinates. The the oretical results presented are accompanied by simulations and experimental data, coming from a real setup, which give clear evidence of some relevant aspects of the biological vision-like fixation, vergence, and eye-head comp ensation. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.