Perceptual system for intelligent service robot by using a three-dimensional range camera

This paper discusses a perceptual system for a intelligent service robot from the viewpoint of human visual perception. Recently, various sensors were equipped with an autonomous robot enable to get too much information on the environment. However, the robot must perceive the necessary information from too much information to take a flexible action like a human. In this study, we emphasize the importance of human vision for the robot to realize perception and action flexibility. Especially, we focus on the perceptual system based on perceiving-acting cycle discussed in ecological psychology. First, we propose a retinal model for a 3D-range camera based on human retinal structure, and the information extraction method using a spiking neural network based on perceiving-acting cycle. Next, we apply the proposed method for a task of clearing the table. As an experimental result, we show the proposed method can directly perceive the necessary information by the attention mechanism for the flexible perception according to spatiotemporal context based on the spiking neural network.