'Bee-bot': using peripheral optical flow to avoid obstacles

The bee-bot demonstrates the ability to use low resolution motion vision over large fields of view to steer safely between obstacles. The system uses one receptive field for each of the left and right peripheral visual fields. This is implemented with a camera looking obliquely to each side of the robot. The largest optical flow in a receptive field indicates the proximity of the nearest object. The left and right proximities are easily compared to steer through the gap. Negative feedback control of steering is able to tolerate inaccuracies in this signal estimation. The low cost of such inexpensive basic navigation competence can free additional resources for attending to the environment.