Overt visual attention inside JDE control architecture

In this paper a visual overt attention mechanism is presented. It builds and keeps updated a scene representation of all the relevant objects around a robot, especially if they are far away of each other and do not lie in the same camera image. The algorithm chooses the next fixation point for a monocular camera, which is mounted over a pantilt unit. Our approach is based on two related dynamics: liveliness and saliency. The liveliness of each relevant object diminishes in time but increases with new observations of such object. The position of each valid object is a possible fixation point for the camera. The saliency of each fixation point increases in time but is reset after the camera visit such location. Real experiments with a pioneer robot endowed with a firewire camera on a pantilt unit are displayed