Multi-purpose wide-angle vision system for remote control of planetary exploring rover

Wide-Angle Fovea Vision Sensor (WAFVS) system was designed and developed being inspired from advantages of the human eye´s functions. This system is characterized by its space-variant data acquisition property, i.e., the WAFVS captures a 120-degree wide-angle input image in which its resolution (or magnification) changes like the human visual acuity. As well-known, the human visual acuity is the highest at its central field of view (FOV) and decreases rapidly towards its peripheral FOV. Thus, using the WAFVS, we can observe a target in detail by its central field of view while observing the whole of environment by its wide field of view. In addition, by controlling a view direction of the WAFVS, this WAFVS system gets visual information from the environment more in detail by smaller data amount. Hence, the WAFVS achieves a better performance of data transmission and data storage. One of severe problems in remote control of rovers, UAVs, and satellites is of a pay-load. In this point of view, the authors think that the WAFVS is suitable for the planetary exploring rover because it was originally developed for multi-purpose use of a single vision sensor. This paper describes the multi-purpose use of the WAFVS system, i.e., the following tasks: (1) observing the environment displayed to the operator for the remote navigation of the rover, (2) recording images of important scenes by changing a view direction of the WAFVS, and (3) monitoring if the instruments on the rover work well or not. Moreover, this paper experiments and discusses on how to display images to the operator when an eye-tracking device is applied as a target coordinate input device. Accuracy index, i.e., a measurement error of a target, is defined in order to evaluate performance of a combination among the vision sensor, the coordinate input device and the image display method.