Biomimetic Oculomotor Control
Tomohiro Shibata, Sethu Vijayakumar, Jorg Conradt and Stefan Schaal
Abstract of paper published in Adaptive Behaviour.
Oculomotor control in a humanoid robot faces similar problems as
biological oculomotor systems, i.e., capturing targets accurately on a very
narrow fovea, dealing with large delays in the control system, the
stabilization of gaze in face of unknown perturbations of the body,
selective attention, and the complexity of stereo vision.
In this paper, we suggest control circuits to realize three of the most
basic oculomotor behaviors and their integration - the vestibulo-ocular
and optokinetic reflex (VOR-OKR) for gaze stabilization, smooth pursuit
for tracking moving objects, and saccades for overt visual attention.
Each of these behaviors and the mechanism for their integration was
derived with inspiration from computational theories as well as behavioral and
physiological data in neuroscience.
Our implementations on a humanoid robot demonstrate good performance of
the oculomotor behaviors, which proves to be a viable strategy to
explore novel control mechanisms for humanoid robotics. Conversely,
insights gained from our models have been able to directly influence views
and provide new directions for computational neuroscience research.
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nsional input space (35 position, velocity,