An advanced active vision system imitating human eye movements

Visual attention plays an important role when we interact with surrounding environment, allowing us to deal with the complexity of everyday scenes. Similarly, a design of a robot vision system that mimics human vision system and has the ability to autonomously explore unknown environment and acquires new knowledge is our main concern. In this paper we designed an advanced active vision system for humanoid robots that imitates human eye movements: saccade eye movements, pursuit eye movements, vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) eye movements as well as vergence eye movements. Besides, we proposed an open-loop servo controller for fast fixation on target together with a closed-loop servo controller for precise vergence operation. We also implemented VOR eye movements to stabilize vision during pursuit. We ran a real-time tracker to test our system and the experimental results showed that our system achieved promising performance of the similar eye movements as human vision system, which paves the road for our future humanoid robot research. The robust and real-time performance also showed that proposed bio-inspired robot vision system can be applied to various mobile robot applications for explorative and exploitative learning activities.