Environmental perception for grasping an unknown object based on 3D range distance information

This paper discusses a perceptual system for an intelligent robot. A robot should be able to perceive environments flexibly to exhibit intelligent behavior. We focus on a perceptual system based on the perceiving-acting cycle discussed in ecological psychology. The perceptual system we have proposed consists of a retinal model and a spiking-neural network realizing the perceiving-acting cycle concept. We apply our proposal to a robot arm with a three-dimensional (3D)-range camera. First, we verify the integrated perceptual module based on perceiving-acting cycle. Furthermore, we propose the perceptual module for perceiving an unknown object based on 3D surfaces. We discuss the potency for detecting dish posture or position. As experimental results a perceptual module based on 3D surfaces is effective for detecting a dish posture or position from unsteady 3D measurement information.