An Active Vision System for Detecting, Fixating and Manipulating Objects in the Real World

The ability to autonomously acquire new knowledge through interaction with the environment is an important research topic in the field of robotics. The knowledge can only be acquired if suitable perception-action capabilities are present: a robotic system has to be able to detect, attend to and manipulate objects in its surrounding. In this paper, we present the results of our long-term work in the area of vision-based sensing and control. The work on finding, attending, recognizing and manipulating objects in domestic environments is studied. We present a stereo-based vision system framework where aspects of top-down and bottom-up attention as well as foveated attention are put into focus and demonstrate how the system can be utilized for robotic object grasping.