Acquisition of local maps by fixation

The vision sensor of a conventional mobile robot is attached to the body of the robot. For more flexible environment recognition, it is necessary to allow the vision sensor to controlling visual attention mechanism of a mobile robot, and examine a method for obtaining a local map. A set of equations which produces the local map from continuous observational data is described. Advantages of the controlling visual attention are presented, based on an error analysis. The advantages are that the environment can be obtained from a coordinate system based on the object under attention, and that errors in the determined position of the object are smaller than with other methods which do not include a controlling visual attention. Experimental results using a Kalman filter for a set of continuous observational data show that an accurate local map is produced.