Search Results for: robot vision

Building a highly accurate robot is not trivial yet we can perform fine positioning tasks like threading a needle using hand-eye coordination. For a robot we call this visual servoing.

Vision is useful to us and to almost all forms of life on the planet, perhaps robots could do more if they could also see. Robots could mimic human stereo vision or use cameras with superhuman capability such as wide angle or panoramic views.

Vision is a critically important sense for humans and, in fact, for almost all animals. If it’s useful to us then surely it would be a useful sensor for robots.

We introduce the topic of robotics, the recent history, why we need robots and the future of robots.

One very powerful trick used by humans is binocular vision. The images from each eye are quite similar, but there is a small horizontal shift, a disparity, between them and that shift is a function of the object distance.

Humans have been fascinated by the sense of vision for a long time, but it took a while to figure out how it worked. We now understand that illumination falls on an object and some light is reflected into our eye where it is sensed and interpreted by our brain.

The human eye is quite amazing, let’s look at its various components including the light sensitive rod and cone cells.

The sense of vision evolved over 540 million years ago and ushered in the Cambrian explosion and complex life forms, such as trilobites, with eyes. How did such an amazing sense come to exist?

Now let’s talk about the sense of vision, something we use almost all the time and practically take for granted.