EnVision, a Vision System for Envirobot

The paper describes EnVision, a vision system created for the Envirobot at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL)’s BioRobotics laboratory. The project consists of two main tasks. The first is to create some form of visual control, linking input from the cameras to the actuators of the Envirobot. We will primarily be using a biologically inspired feed forward spiking neural network, detailed in the work of Iman Kamali Sarvestani[11]. We will see that a simple network is capable of exhibiting a variety of behaviors depending on how we tune the parameters of the network and its neurons. The second task is to create a functional vision system, defining and prototyping mechanical, electrical and other hardware aspects of the system so that we have a platform upon which we can test our visual model.