When a quadrupedal robot moves, the body and head pitch, yaw and roll, because of its stepping. This natural effect of body and head motion adversely effects the use of visual sensors embedded in the robot’s head. Any object in the visual frame of the robot will, from the perspective of the robot, be subject to considerable unmodeled motion or slip. This problem does not affect mammals, which have vestibulo-collic and vestibulo-ocular reflexes that stabilize their gaze in space and maintain objects of interest approximately fixed on the retina. Our work is aimed towards constructing an artificial vestibular system for quadrupedal robots to maintain accurate gaze. This paper describes the first part of this work, wherein we have mounted an artificial vestibular system in a Sony aibo robot.
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