Task-Oriented Probabilistic Active Vision

In this work, an explicitly task-oriented approach to the active vision problem is presented. The system tries to reduce the most relevant components of the uncertainty in the world model, for the task the robot is currently performing. It is task oriented in the sense that it explicitly considers a task-specific value function. As test-bed for the presented active vision approach, we selected a robot soccer attention problem: goalcovering by a goalie player. The proposed system is compared with information-based approaches. Experimental results show that it surpasses them in the tested application. We conclude that, when the goal is not the uncertainty reduction itself, the minimization of the belief entropy is not a useful optimality criterion, and that for such cases, task-oriented optimality criteria are better suited.