Head-centered orientation strategies in animate vision

The authors consider orienting, that is, establishing and maintaining a spatial relation between a motorized pair of cameras (the eye-head system) and a static or a moving object tracked over time. Motivated by physiological evidence, they propose a simple set of vision-based strategies aimed to perform head, eye, and body movements in a complex environment. Fixation is shown to be an essential feature in visual servoing, and is used to decouple control on head rotational degrees of freedom, making possible a metric-less approach to the orientation problem. An implementation of these strategies, using a binocular camera system mounted on a PUMA 700 robotic system, demontrated the effectiveness of the approach