On Seeing Robots

The title of this paper, "On Seeing Robots", leaves substantial scope for playful exploration. The simple ambiguity is, of course, between describing robots that see their worlds and systems that see robots. These categories are not exclusive: I also combine them and discuss robots that see robots and even robots that see themselves. Furthermore, the title is designed to echo, and pay homage to, a classic vision paper entitled "On Seeing Things" by Max Clowes [1] as I have done once before [2]. But the context, the arguments and the conclusions are new; the comparison is used explicitly here to show the difference between the classical approach and an emerging situated approach to robotic perception. The most important reading of the title is that the paper is about how we see robots; it is about the computational paradigms, the assumptions, the architectures and the tools we use to design and build robots.