Cooperative Active Sensing for Nuclear Power Plant Inspection

In order to realize an autonomous nuclear power plant, the sensing system performing daily inspection inside of the plant is indispensable. For the sensing system, reliability and exibility are demanded to cope with risky and complicated environments. In order to build such sensing system, we have been emphasizing the importance of cooperation and active control of various sensing functions, and the role of visual sensing as the most signi cant sensing function. In this paper, what criteria must be satis ed by the visual sensing system is rst described and the active vision system equipped with foveated image acquisition capability is introduced as the practical implementation. Furthermore we propose the attention control mechanism to realize e ective and reliable visual sensing by the foveated active vision system.