Steering and Navigation Behaviours Using Fixation

Steering a motor vehicle around a winding but otherwise uncluttered road has been observed by Land and Lee (1994) to involve repeated periods of visual xation upon the tangent point of the inside of each bend. We demonstrate a similar use ofàctive' xation in the autonomous navigation of a robot vehicle around an obstacle, and show how the control law devised for steering in the robotic example is applicable to the observed human performance data. We discuss the merits of xation for mobile robot localization.