This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Suzuki, M. Articles by Floreano, D. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Enactive Robot Vision

Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, mototaka{at}gmail.com

Dario Floreano

Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, Dario.Floreano{at}epfl.ch

Enactivism claims that sensory-motor activity and embodiment are crucial in perceiving the environment and that machine vision could be a much simpler business if considered in this context. However, computational models of enactive vision are very rare and often rely on handcrafted control systems. In this article, we argue that the apparent complexity of the environment and of the robot brain can be significantly simplified if perception, behavior, and learning are allowed to co-develop on the same timescale. In doing so, robots become sensitive to, and actively exploit, characteristics of the environment that they can tackle within their own computational and physical constraints. We describe the application of this methodology in three sets of experiments: shape discrimination, car driving, and wheeled robot navigation. A further set of experiments, where the visual system can develop the receptive fields by means of unsupervised Hebbian learning, demonstrates that the receptive fields are consistently and significantly affected by the behavior of the system and differ from those predicted by most computational models of the visual cortex. Finally, we show that our robots can also replicate the performance deficiencies observed in experiments of motor deprivation with kittens.

Key Words: active vision • enaction • evolutionary robotics • neural networks • computer vision • mobile robots

Adaptive Behavior, Vol. 16, No. 2-3, 122-128 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1059712308089183


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?