Bionics-Based Approach for Object Tracking to Implement in Robot Applications

Abstract

In this paper, an approach for object tracking that is inspired from human oculomotor system is proposed and verified experimentally. The developed approach divided into two phases, fast tracking or saccadic phase and smooth pursuit phase. In the first phase, the field of the view is segmented into four regions that are analogue to retinal periphery in the oculomotor system. When the object of interest is entering these regions, the developed vision system responds by changing the values of the pan and tilt angles to allow the object lies in the fovea area and then the second phase will activate. A fuzzy logic method is implemented in the saccadic phase as an intelligent decision maker to select the values of the pan and tilt angle based on suggested logical rules. In smooth pursuit phase, the object is kept in the center area of the field of the view by smooth adjusting the values of the pan and tilt angles where this stage is analogue to putting the observing object in the fovea centralis of the oculomotor system. The proposed approach was implemented by using (Camera-Pan / Tilt) configuration and showed good results to improve the vision capability of the humanoid robots.