Unifying Perspectives in Computational and Robot Vision

Currently there is a gap between the research conducted in computer vision and robotics communities. There are many characteristics in common in computer vision research and vision research in robotics. Despite having these common interests, however, pure computer vision has seen significant theoretical and methodological advances during the last decade which many of the robotics researchers are not fully aware of. On the other hand, the manipulation and control capabilities of robots as well as the range of application areas have developed greatly. In robotics, vision can not be considered an isolated component, but it is instead a part of a system resulting in an action. Thus, in robotics the vision research must include consideration of the control of the system, in other words, the entire perception-action loop. This requires that a holistic system approach is useful and could provide significant advances in this application domain. Assembled here is a collection of some of the state of the art methods that are using computer vision and machine learning techniques and apply them in robotic applications.