A distributed cognitive approach in cybernetic modelling of human vision in a robotic swarm

Abstract Objectives In this paper a novel approach regarding image analysis in Machine Vision applications was proposed. Methods The presented concept consists of two issues: (1) shifting some of the complex image processing and understanding algorithms from a mobile robot to distributed computer, and (2) designing the cognitive system (in a distributed computer) in such a way, that it would be common for numerous robots. The authors of this work focused on image processing, and they propose to accelerate vision understanding by using Cooperative Vision (CoV), i.e., to get video input from cooperating robots and process it in a centralized system. Results To verify the purposefulness of such approach, a comparative study is currently being conducted, involving a classical single-camera Computer Vision (CV) mobile robot and two (or more) single-camera CV robots cooperating in CoV mode. Conclusions The CoV system is being designed and implemented so that the algorithm would be able to utilize multiple video sources for recognition of objects on the very same scene.