Visual attention control for nuclear power plant inspection

Industrial inspection robots, which are to move around in a nuclear power plant and carry out inspection tasks, must follow a given route while observing static and dynamic features of the environment. A stereo active vision system has been developed, equipped with foveated wide-field image acquisition and mounted on a mobile robot. With this or other types of active sensors, only the foveated center of the field of view can extract precise information, so the camera pose must be controlled to fixate the target area for execution of a particular visual task. The activities of inspection robots lead to multiple visual tasks, requiring both reactive and premeditated types of attention, and therefore the robot must apply its sensing resources sequentially among multiple possibilities. In this paper, we propose a new framework for visual attention control for a mobile robot, describe the implementation of the proposed framework, and show some examples in which the camera pose is controlled to achieve multiple visual tasks