Space-variant active vision and visually guided robotics: design and construction of a high-performance miniature vehicle

In this paper, the design and implementation of a miniature visually guided robot vehicle are described. The design principle underlying this vehicle, which is called CORTEX-II, is the space-variant visual architecture of visual cortex. This allows a wide visual field and high resolution to be maintained in a small and relatively inexpensive system. With a total weight of under twenty kg and size of about .5 meters, CORTEX-II incorporates a three degree of freedom active vision system (pan, tilt and zoom) mounted on a 1 degree of freedom "neck", 160 Mflops (loosely coupled array of four TI320C40 parallel DSP's) and 48 megabytes of memory. Topics discussed here are modification of a stock RC vehicle platform, integration of the parallel DSP platform, active vision system, battery and power systems, communications, and a programming environment for development of the real-time parallel tasks that is transparently portable between simulation and robot run time contexts. Potential applications for systems of this type include traffic monitoring, autonomous driving research, security and surveillance, space-exploration, smart weapons systems, and other application domains in which small, low-cost, high performance visually guided robots are required.