<title>Active stereo vision routines using PRISM-3</title>

Abstract

This paper describes work in progress on a set of visual routines and supporting capabilities implemented on the PRISM-3 real-time vision system. The routines are used in an outdoor robot retrieval task. The task requires the robot to locate a donor agent -- a Hero2000 -- which holds the object to be retrieved, to navigate to the donor, to accept the object from the donor, and return to its original location. The routines described here will form an integral part of the navigation and wide-area search tasks. Active perception is exploited to locate the donor using real-time stereo ranging directed by a pan/tilt/verge mechanism. A framework for orchestrating visual search has been implemented and is briefly described.