Design of a Saccading and Accommodating Robot Vision System

Biologically inspired vision systems, such as convolutional networks, have begun to rival humans in some vision tasks. A key difference between such systems and the human visual system is that the latter dedicates most of its resources to a small fraction of the visual field (the fovea), which it moves frequently and rapidly to acquire a series of rich representations of small parts of a scene. We are developing an artificial system to approximate this aspect of human vision on a robot. The main components are a novel foveating lens, and a novel gimbal that can perform rapid and precise stereo camera orientation. This paper focuses on the gimbal design, which we are releasing under an open hardware license. We expect that it will serve as both an advanced robot vision system, and a source of further insight into human vision.

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