Planning focus of attention for multi-fingered hand with consideration of time-varying aspects

Visual monitoring of an object manipulated by a multi-fingered hand has a problem of occlusions caused by the fingers. We propose a new planning method, based on a 3-dimensional CAD model of the environment, to focus attention in such a monitoring task. We formulate the planning to focus attention as a scheduling problem for the whole task period rather than for a specific time. We introduce a genetic algorithm to cope with combinatorial explosion of the image features considered during time-sequential aspects in the task. The genetic algorithm is a population-based search method which efficiently finds solutions in a large search space by simulating biological evolutionary processes. The algorithm consists of selection, crossover, and mutation procedures applied to a population of chromosomes. To solve the problem of planning a focus of attention by using the genetic algorithm, we employed a coding scheme for a chromosome to produce consistent offspring after the crossover. Experimental results show the usefulness of the proposed method by finding the pseudo optimal plan within a short computation time