Evolutionary Active Vision Toward Three Dimensional Landmark-Navigation

Active vision may be useful to perform landmark-based navigation where landmark relationship requires active scanning of the environment. In this article we explore this hypothesis by evolving the neural system controlling vision and behavior of a mobile robot equipped with a pan/tilt camera so that it can discriminate visual patterns and arrive at the goal zone. The experimental setup employed in this article requires the robot to actively move its gaze direction and integrate information over time in order to accomplish the task. We show that the evolved robot can detect separate features in a sequential manner and discriminate the spatial relationships. An intriguing hypothesis on landmark-based navigation in insects derives from the present results.