The sensory ego-sphere: a mediating interface between sensors and cognition

The Sensory Ego-Sphere (SES) is an interface for a robot that serves to mediate information between sensors and cognition. The SES can be visualized as a sphere centered on the coordinate frame of the robot, spatially indexed by polar and azimuthal angles. Internally, the SES is a graph with a fixed number of edges that partitions surrounding space and contains localized sensor information from the robot. This paper describes the SES and gives the results of implementing the SES on multiple robots, both humanoid and mobile, to support essential functions such as a localized short-term memory, spatio-temporal sensory-motor event detection, attentional processing, data sharing, and ego-centric navigation. ∗This research was supported in part by DARPA-IPTO grant DASG60-99-1-0005, and NASA-JSC grants NAG91428, NAG9-1446 and NAG9-1515. Peters et al. Revised for Autonomous Robots Sensory Ego-Sphere