Revisiting Active Perception
This is an incremental review that organizes past literature to highlight foundational contributions for researchers in robotics and AI.
The paper reviews historical ideas and methods in active perception, arguing that seminal contributions remain relevant and are poised for renewed application in modern robotic perception systems with current computational tools.
Despite the recent successes in robotics, artificial intelligence and computer vision, a complete artificial agent necessarily must include active perception. A multitude of ideas and methods for how to accomplish this have already appeared in the past, their broader utility perhaps impeded by insufficient computational power or costly hardware. The history of these ideas, perhaps selective due to our perspectives, is presented with the goal of organizing the past literature and highlighting the seminal contributions. We argue that those contributions are as relevant today as they were decades ago and, with the state of modern computational tools, are poised to find new life in the robotic perception systems of the next decade.