Steering and Navigation Behaviours Using Fixation

Abstract

Steering a motor vehicle around a winding but otherwise uncluttered road has been observed by Land and Lee (1994) to involve repeated periods of visual fixation upon the tangent point of the inside of each bend. We demonstrate a similar use of `active' fixation in the autonomous navigation of a robot vehicle around an obstacle, and show how the control law devised for steering in the robotic example is applicable to the observed human performance data. We discuss the merits of fixation for mobile robot localization.