title: Event-driven visual attention for the humanoid robot iCub.
abstract: Fast reaction to sudden and potentially interesting stimuli is a crucial feature for safe and reliable interaction with the environment. Here we present a biologically inspired attention system developed for the humanoid robot iCub. It is based on input from unconventional event-driven vision sensors and an efficient computational method. The resulting system shows low-latency and fast determination of the location of the focus of attention. The performance is benchmarked against an instance of the state of the art in robotics artificial attention system used in robotics. Results show that the proposed system is two orders of magnitude faster that the benchmark in selecting a new stimulus to attend.
authors.affiliation: Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Science, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Rea
authors.affiliation: iCub Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Giorgio
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Metta
authors.affiliation: iCub Facility, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Genova, Italy.
authors.forename: Chiara
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bartolozzi
keywords: event-driven; humanoid robotics; neuromorphic; saliency map; visual attention