Reactive robot control using optical analog VLSI sensors

The use of three types of spatio-temporal processing elements is investigated for optical sensory preprocessing in order to solve robot control problems in mobile robotics. The sensory elements are optical analog VLSI silicon retina type devices that do on-chip gradient operations and perform a current mode hysteretic winner-take-all function. Each sensor device extracts a characteristic feature from the optical input: position of highest contrast along a 1-D array, maximum speed along a 1-D array, maximum optical flow on a 2-D array. These are continuously calculated by the respective sensory devices. The sensory devices are applied in a mobile robotics application. They are used for active ball control, ball velocity prediction and active gaze-control for RoboCup Middle-Size League robots.