ABSTRACT
The research topics presented in this chapter have been selected from among those carried out at our institution in the field of active vision, in order to explain the importance and the intimate relationship between visual processing and motion for the solution of difficult visual tasks. Although the results presented are taken from different application areas (such as navigation, manipulation and gaze control), three common and important aspects represent the fil rouge and the motivation of the work presented: purposiveness, closed-loop control, and concurrency of motion and sensing. This last aspect, in particular, will be stressed in order to demonstrate that the simultaneous and coordinated operation of vision and action can be used not only to simplify some “traditional” visual tasks but also to extend the overall scope of vision to new important areas.
