Robotic Nation Evidence

Robotic Vision

New Aibo to lead the way in robotic vision

From the article:

In robotics, the technology enables a robot to take pictures of its environment, then create a visual map of the room or house. "It allows the robot to know where it is but also have visual representation," Louvat said. "A vacuum cleaner could be taken out of its box, explore its environment, take pictures, create a map and could then be programmed to clean any room in house, and know where charger is." Other potential markets, said Louvat, include work in the work in health care market where a robot could deliver supplies and medicine to different rooms. "The precision can be pretty high," added Louvat.

ER's software can recognise objects when they are turned upside down, or turned at an angle to the camera; recognise objects as they move closer to, or farther away from, the camera; recognise objects that are partially obscured by other objects (ER claims that some objects can be recognised even when they are 90 percent occluded); deal with lighting artifacts caused by reflections and backlighting.

This is in 2002, without any custom vision hardware. In 10 years, the capabilities of vision hardware and software will have advanced significantly. See this article for a representation of where we are likely to be in 20 years.

See also this article.