APES: actively perceiving robot

Robot vision systems inspired by human vision are required to employ mechanisms similar to those which are known to play key roles in human visual performance. Some of the more crucial properties are: 1) ability to actively select and filter visual input by changing its focus of attention both mechanically and mentally; 2) a retina model which will reduce computational complexity like in the human eye; 3) levels of representation; 4) serial processing of incoming stream of visual data; and 5) memory mechanisms that will keep track of eye movements and store functional models of the environment. APES is a mobile robot developed in our laboratory to meet these requirements simultaneously and to act as a test-bed for biologically motivated robot vision research. In this paper we describe APES and the original approaches taken to realize the above properties of biological vision.