Environmental perception for a robot using 3D range camera

This paper discusses robot perception of an unexpected object for human friendly robots using 3D range camera. A robot should be able to perceive an environment flexibly to realize an intelligent behavior. We focus on a perceptual system for human visual perception based on ecological psychology. We have proposed a perceptual system composed of the retinal model and the spiking-neural network to realize the concept of the perceiving-acting cycle. The proposed method is applied to a robot arm equipped with a 3D range camera. In this paper, we propose an integrated perceptual system for accuracy improvement of perception. Moreover, we propose a perceptual element to install to the integrated perceptual system that detects an unexpected posture or object by using 3D range camera. As experimental results, we show that the proposed method perceives the target object accurately by an integration of different perceptual elements, and the robot recognizes an unexpected paper ball.