Page 230 - Innovations in Intelligent Machines

Toward Robot Perception
through Omnidirectional Vision

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Jos´ Gaspar , Niall Winters , Etienne Grossmann ,
e
and Jos´ Santos-Victor 1 ∗
e
1
Instituto de Sistemas e Rob´otica
Instituto Superior T´ecnico
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1
1049-001 Lisboa - Portugal.
(jag,etienne,jasv)@isr.ist.utl.pt
2
London Knowledge Lab
23-29 Emerald St
London WC1N 3QS, UK.
n.winters@ioe.ac.uk
“My dear Miss Glory, Robots are not people. They are mechanically more
perfect than we are, they have an astounding intellectual capacity...”
From the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Capek, 1920.

1 Introduction

Vision is an extraordinarily powerful sense. The ability to perceive the envi-
ronment allows for movement to be regulated by the world. Humans do this
effortlessly but we still lack an understanding of how perception works. Our
approach to gaining an insight into this complex problem is to build artificial
visual systems for semi-autonomous robot navigation, supported by human-
robot interfaces for destination specification. We examine how robots can use
images, which convey only 2D information, in a robust manner to drive its
actions in 3D space. Our work provides robots with the perceptual capabili-
ties to undertake everyday navigation tasks, such as go to the fourth office in
the second corridor. We present a complete navigation system with a focus on
building – in line with Marr’s theory [57] – mediated perception modalities.
We address fundamental design issues associated with this goal; namely sensor
design, environmental representations, navigation control and user interaction.
∗
This work was partially supported by Funda¸c˜ao para a Ciˆencia e a Tecnologia
(ISR/IST plurianual funding) through the POS Conhecimento Program that
includes FEDER funds. Etienne Grossmann is presently at Tyzx.com.

J. Gaspar et al.: Toward Robot Perception through Omnidirectional Vision, Studies in
Computational Intelligence (SCI) 70, 223–270 (2007)
www.springerlink.com c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007