1. Introduction
To work well with human populations, a mobile robot must be broadly socially aware, able to detect and recognize the people around it in the environment, identify hu-man attributes (e.g., age, gender), and estimate emotional states and intentions. These requirements suggest a very wide (ideally panoramic) sensory Field-of-View (FoV) to avoid blind spots, i.e., directions in which the robot is un-aware of human occupancy or activity. At the same time, identifying individuals, estimating traits and understanding intent in the far field generally requires high spatial acuity, to support face or expression recognition or estimation of gaze direction, for example. For a fixed sensor pixel resolution, this generates a resolution-FoV tradeoff: expansion of the FoV to support wide-field awareness leads to a reduction in acuity needed for interpretation, especially in the far field.