Visual tracking and target selection for mobile robots

This paper describes how tracking and target selection are used in two behavior systems of the XT-1 vision architecture for mobile robots. The first system is concerned with active tracking of moving targets and the second is used for visually controlled spatial navigation. We overview the XT-1 architecture and describe the role of expectation-based template matching for both target tracking and navigation. The subsystems for low-level processing, attentional processing, single feature processing, spatial relations, and place/object-recognition are described and we present a number of behaviors that can make use of the different visual processing stages. The architecture, which is inspired by biology, has been successfully implemented in a number of robots which are also briefly described.