Strategies for Object Manipulation using Foveal and Peripheral Vision

Visual feedback is used extensively in robotics and application areas range from human-robot interaction to object grasping and manipulation. There have been a number of examples of how to develop different components required by the above applications and very few general vision systems capable of performing a variety of tasks. In this paper, we concentrate on vision strategies for robotic manipulation tasks in a domestic environment. In particular, given fetch-and-carry type of tasks, the issues related to the whole detect-approach-grasp loop are considered. We deal with the problem of flexibility and robustness by using monocular and binocular visual cues and their integration. We demonstrate real-time disparity estimation, object recognition and pose estimation. We also show how a combination of foveal and peripheral vision system can be combined in order to provide a wide, low resolution and narrow, high resolution field of view.