Control of visual attention in mobile robots

The authors describe a control system for a binocular image acquisition mechanism, for use in mobile robotic systems, which allows shifts in focus of attenuation to be made in a natural, device-independent manner. The control method is based on the modal control technique proposed by R.W. Brockett (Proc. IEEE Robotics Autom. Conf., 1988). The shifts are accomplished by altering the feedback gains applied to the visual feedback paths in the position and velocity control loops of the binocular camera system. By altering these gains, a feature-selection operation can be performed by which the saliency of a given feature is enhanced, while the saliency of other features is reduced. Two experiments performed with the system to demonstrate modal control of attention are discussed