Intelligent Active Vision Systems For Robots

In this paper, an active vision system is developed which is based on image strategy. The image based control structure uses the optical flow algorithm for motion detection of an object in a visual scene. Because the optical flow is very sensitive to changes in illumination or to the quality of the video, it was necessary to use median filtering and erosion and dilatation morphological operations for the decrease of erroneous blobs residing in individual frames. Since the image coordinates of the object are subjected to noise, the Kalman filtering technique is adopted for robust estimation. A fuzzy controller based on the fuzzy condensed algorithm allows real time work for each captured frame. Finally, the proposed active vision system has been simulated in the development/simulation environment Matlab/Simulink.

One of the series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence, this book covers subjects including the Harvard binocular head; heads, eyes, and head-eye systems; a binocular robot head with torsional eye movements; and escape and dodging behaviours for reactive control.

Intelligent robotics has become the focus of extensive research activity. This effort has been motivated by the wide variety of applications that can benefit from the developments. These applications often involve mobile robots, multiple robots working and interacting in the same work area, and operations in hazardous environments like nuclear power plants. Applications in the consumer and service sectors are also attracting interest. These applications have highlighted the importance of performance, safety, reliability, and fault tolerance. This volume is a selection of papers from a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in July 1989 with a focus on active perception and robot vision. The papers deal with such issues as motion understanding, 3-D data analysis, error minimization, object and environment modeling, object detection and recognition, parallel and real-time vision, and data fusion. The paradigm underlying the papers is that robotic systems require repeated and hierarchical application of the perception-planning-action cycle. The primary focus of the papers is the perception part of the cycle. Issues related to complete implementations are also discussed.

Visual perception is one of the most important sources of information for both humans and robots. A particular challenge is the acquisition and interpretation of complex unstructured scenes. This work contributes to active vision for humanoid robots. A semantic model of the scene is created, which is extended by successively changing the robot's view in order to explore interaction possibilities of the scene.

Annotation Embedded vision systems such as smart cameras have been rapidly developed recently. Vision systems have become smaller and lighter, but their performance has improved. The algorithms in embedded vision systems have their specifications limited by frequency of CPU, memory size, and architecture. The goal of this e-book is to provide a an advanced reference work for engineers, researchers and scholars in the field of robotics, machine vision, and automation and to facilitate the exchange of their ideas, experiences and views on embedded vision system models. The effectiveness for all methods is emphasized in a practical sense for systems presented in this e-book.

Robot vision refers to the capability of a robot to visually perceive the environment and use this information for execution of various tasks. Visual feedback has been used extensively for robot navigation and obstacle avoidance. In the recent years, there are also examples that include interaction with people and manipulation of objects. In this paper, we review some of the work that goes beyond of using artificial landmarks and fiducial markers for the purpose of implementing visionbased control in robots. We discuss different application areas, both from the systems perspective and individual problems such as object tracking and recognition.