<title>Generic motion platform for active vision</title>

Abstract

The term 'active vision' was first used by Bajcsy at a NATO workshop in 1982 to describe an emerging field of robot vision which departed sharply from traditional paradigms of image understanding and machine vision. The new approach embeds a moving camera platform as an in-the-loop component of robotic navigation or hand-eye coordination. Visually served steering of the focus of attention supercedes the traditional functions of recognition and gaging. Custom active vision platforms soon proliferated in research laboratories in Europe and North America. In 1990 the National Science Foundation funded the design of a common platform to promote cooperation and reduce cost in active vision research. This paper describes the resulting platform. The design was driven by payload requirements for binocular motorized C-mount lenses on a platform whose performance and articulation emulate those of the human eye- head system. The result was a 4-DOF mechanisms driven by servo controlled DC brush motors. A crossbeam supports two independent worm-gear driven camera vergence mounts at speeds up to 1,000 degrees per second over a range of +/- 90 degrees from dead ahead. This crossbeam is supported by a pan-tilt mount whose horizontal axis intersects the vergence axes for translation-free camera rotation about these axes at speeds up to 500 degrees per second.