Robot navigation from a Gibsonian viewpoint

On robots and flies: Modeling the visual orientation behavior of flies

“…Visuomotor controllers have been developed that use visual motion information. Mostly these agents use the visual motion information for obstacle avoidance [12,18,51] or tracking of other objects [8,35].…”

A vision-based autopilot for a miniature air vehicle: joint speed control and lateral obstacle avoidance

“…To explain this centring response, these authors hypothesized that the animal may balance the apparent motion of the images of the walls between their two eyes. In the field of robotics, many authors have made use of this 'optic flow balance' hypothesis in designing visually guided wheeled vehicles (Coombs and Roberts 1992;Duchon and Warren 1994;Santos-Victor et al 1995;Dev et al 1997;Weber et al 1997;Carelli et al 2002;Argyros et al 2004;Hrabar et al 2005;Humbert et al 2007), or aerial vehicles (Hrabar et al 2005;Griffiths et al 2006), and simulating flying agents (Neumann and Bülthoff 2001;Muratet et al 2005) and hovercraft (Humbert et al 2005). The 'optic flow balance' hypothesis has been tested mainly in corridors and urban canyons.…”

Honeybees as a Model for the Study of Visually Guided Flight, Navigation, and Biologically Inspired Robotics

“…Following the publication of the studies on the centering response of the bee, several laboratories have built land-based robots that navigate through corridors by us-ing the principles of balancing lateral image motion to steer through the middle of the corridor, and maintaining a constant image velocity to regulate the speed of locomotion (1,25,50,61,112,217,279). Computationally, this approach is more amenable to real-time implementation than methods that use stereovision to calculate the distances to the walls.…”