Cheap Vision-Exploiting Ecological Niche and Morphology

In the course of evolutionary history, the visual system has evolved as part of a complete autonomous agent in the service of motor control. Therefore, the synthetic methodology investigates visual skills in the context of tasks a complete agent has to perform in a particular environment using autonomous mobile robots as modeling tools. We present a number of case studies in which certain vision-based behaviors in insects have been modeled with real robots, the snapshot model for landmark navigation, the average landmark vector model (ALV), a model of visual odometry, and the evolution of the morphology of an insect eye. From these case studies we devise a number of principles that characterize the concept of "cheap vision". It is concluded that--if ecological niche and morphology are properly taken into account--in many cases vision becomes much simpler.

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