Aims and scope
The core subject of the summer school is the interplay between vision and motion control, and the way this interplay can be exploited in order to achieve a knowledge of the surrounding environment that allows intelligent agents to properly interact with it.
A complete and operative cognition of the visual space can be achieved only through active exploration, and the natural effectors of this cognition are the eyes and the arms. The contextual control and use of arm and eye movements, and the gathering and integrated use of visual with somatosensory and tactile information allow primates to build a consistent representation of their peripersonal space. In this school we will learn about how these visuomotor mechanisms are managed by the primate brain, and how the robotics community is taking inspiration from them in order to improve the capabilities of robots in their interaction with the environment. Related issues that will be included in the school are stereoscopic vision, object recognition, dynamic shifts of attention, 3D space perception including eye and arm movements.
The school is dedicated to researchers interested in all theoretical and practical aspects related to the visuomotor mechanisms which allow an autonomous agent to interact with the environment through active exploration. We expect and encourage the participation of people with both technological and/or life sciences background, with the purpose of making the meeting highly interdisciplinary. As a result of this cross-fertilization, we would expect that as we learn more about the neurophysiology of living beings, we will be able to build better robots and, conversely, the construction and programming of robots may provide new hypotheses for the study of neural mechanisms.
The participants will get in touch with other young researchers in the field and will have the opportunity to improve their knowledge through the tutorials given by experts. Another important objective is to provide graduate students a unique training opportunity in this emergent and fast-evolving field. Students will closely interact for one week with some of the top-level researchers in the world in this domain. They will also have the opportunity to discuss their research work with these researchers, as well as with other students.
