Revisiting active perception

Abstract

Despite the recent successes in robotics, artificial intelligence and computer vision, a complete artificial agent necessarily must include active perception. A multitude of ideas and methods for how to accomplish this have already appeared in the past, their broader utility perhaps impeded by insufficient computational power or costly hardware. The history of these ideas, perhaps selective due to our perspectives, is presented with the goal of organizing the past literature and highlighting the seminal contributions. We argue that those contributions are as relevant today as they were decades ago and, with the state of modern computational tools, are poised to find new life in the robotic perception systems of the next decade.

Keywords: Attention; Control; Perception; Sensing.

Fig. 1

The basic elements of Active Perception broken down into their constituent components. Instances of an embodiment of active perception would include the Why component and at least one of the remaining elements whereas a complete active agent would include at least one component from each

Fig. 2

The current standard processing pipeline common in computer vision

Fig. 3

Active perception processing pipeline