A multimodal attention mechanism for autonomous mobile robotics

Proceeding of: IX Workshop on Physical Agents 2008, University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain, September, 11-12th, 2008.Whatever the mission of an autonomous mobile robot is, attention is a helpful cognitive capability when dealing with real world environments. In this paper we present a novel control architecture which enables an integrated and efficient filtering of multiple modality sensory information. The concept of context is introduced as the set of criteria that determines what sensory information is relevant to the current mission. The proposed attention mechanism uses these contexts as a mean to adaptively select the constrained cognitive focus of the robot within the vast multimodal sensory space available. This approach for artificial attention is tested in the domain of autonomous mapping.This research work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science CICYT under grant TRA2007-67374-C02-02.Publicad