Vision system for wearable and robotic uses

Visual perception is thought to provide us with the illusion of a stable visual world that is seamless in time and space while it is continuously explored with saccades. The oculomotor system ensures retinal image stabilization during head, object, and surround motion. Prior to manipulation, objects are fixated with topdown driven look-ahead saccades, and similarly, the locomotion path is visually inspected about two steps ahead. In human-human interaction tasks gaze is not only crucial for motor intention recognition but it is also essential in detecting the direction of social attention. A new prototype of a camera motion control unit was developed that provides a sufficiently short latency and a light-weight setup for both a wearable gaze-controlled and a humanoid stereo camera system. The camera system will serve as a binocular eye plant for a humanoid active vision system. The long-term aim is to integrate eye tracking capabilities into the vision system that will equip the humanoid with the ability to infer the target of gaze of a human in human-machine cooperation scenarios. The eye tracking technology has been improved by extending it into the direction of a calibration-free operation. The antropomorphic camera motion control system was integrated into the humanoid JOHNNIE. Thereby, a new experimental tool was created that will help to evaluate the relevance of gaze and look-ahead fixations in the interaction of humans with humanoids in social contexts or during (humanoid) locomotion.