A high speed gaze control system based on the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex

Stabilizing the visual system is a crucial issue for any sighted mobile creature, whether it will be natural or artificial. The more immune the gaze of an animal or a robot is to various kinds of disturbances (e.g., those created by body or head movements when walking or flying), the less troublesome it will be for the visual system to carry out its many information processing tasks. The gaze control system that we describe in this paper takes a lesson from the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex (VOR), which is known to contribute to stabilizing the human gaze and keeping the retinal image steady. The gaze control system owes its originality and its high performances to the combination of two sensory modalities, as follows: • a visual sensor called Optical Sensor for the Control of Autonomous Robots (OSCAR) which delivers a retinal angular position signal. A new, miniature (10 g), piezo-based version of this visual sensor is presented here; •