An attentive multi-sensor based system for mobile robotics

Usually embodied in real environments, robots are expected to perceive and act in their surrounding world in a human-like fashion [1], through perception, reasoning, planning and decision making processes. Although high computational power is available nowadays, the complexity of real scenes - continuous, partially unknown and usually unpredictable - can not be taken for granted. To actively act in this environment, robots are fully equipped with an enormous amount of sensors, overwhelming them with an immense amount of data that can not fully be processed and that constantly changes across time and space. To overcome this problem, the natural human filter - Attention - could be used as inspiration. This paper proposes an architecture that supports a transfer of domain from visual models to a robotics domain that uses sensors such as range scanners and sonars. Furthermore, it discusses the possibility of using multiple sensors to define multiple features. The experiments were performed in a simulated high fidelity environment and results have shown that the model proposed can account for detecting salient stimuli according to the modeled features.