Active Visual Perception for Humanoid Robots

Robots detect and keep track of relevant objects in their environment to accomplish some tasks. Many of them are equipped with mobile cameras as the main sensors, process the images and maintain an internal representation of the detected objects. We propose a novel active visual memory that moves the camera to detect objects in robot's surroundings and tracks their positions. This visual memory is based on a combination of multi-modal filters that efficiently integrates partial information. The visual attention subsystem is distributed among the software components in charge of detecting relevant objects. We demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of this perception system in a real humanoid robot participating in the RoboCup SPL competition.