The authors have developed a method for applying the active vision paradigm for a vision-guided mobile robot to acquire 3D structure of a man-made environment. The robot plans a circular path by itself, moves along the planned circular path by the visual feedback, computes the camera rotation from the vanishing points of horizontal lines in the scene, and estimates the 3D structure of the environment. Experimental results showed that this method was robust to the disturbances in real environments.>

Matching of scene features observed by a static camera against stored 3D object models has been used for recognizing objects in the scene but suffers from high cost in computation. This paper presents a simple and much less expensive active method for object recognition. A robot with a camera moves around the object along a circular path by visual feedback and identifies the object by matching the consecutive images to 2D object models, the most distinguishable appearances of the objects. Results of preliminary experiments show that the mobile robot moves along the circular path around the object and identifies it by matching the 2D patterns.>