Development of Movable Binocular High-Resolution Eye-Camera Unit for Humanoid and the Evaluation of Looking Around Fixation Control and Object Recognition

Nowadays, studies have been conducted on humanoid robots with human mimetic structures. However, in the field of recognition, there is still much difference between humans and ordinary humanoid robots. For example, humans have movable eyes and use the degrees of freedom (DOF) of eyes in several ways: extension of the field of view, immediate changing of sight direction, focusing on objects to observe thoroughly. This DOF enables humans to adjust input images by aiming the direction of sight to desired objects, even when the body movement is limited. On the other hand, ordinary humanoid robots tend to have the cameras fixed to the head. Therefore, the humanoid has to move the head as a whole in order to change the sight direction of the camera. In this study, we developed both a movable binocular high-resolution eye-camera unit, which is small enough to be installed in the humanoid head, and a system to change input images according to the environment. The developed unit contains cameras, actuators, and motor control boards, being a stand-alone unit that enables the use of the movable eye. A small high-resolution auto-focus camera is used for this eye-camera unit. The developed system is used to adjust the images to the environment, controlling the recognition area by changing the direction of sight, size of input images and resolution.