Application of RGBQ to Robot Vision
Want your robots to see in color? Consider three light sensors – one sensitive to red light, one sensitive to green light, and one sensitive to blue light. These will act as photoreceptors for your robot. We can imagine a more diverse array, but this setup will be sufficient to establish the concept. Now, let’s illuminate.
We take each sensor starting with red, for example, and place a UV-Vis detector next to it. We introduce a dimmable red light source. We will be measuring the electrical response from the sensor and recording the UV-Vis spectrum at each calibration level as we turn on and increase the brightness of the light.
At first, the light is off. There is no (or a baseline) response from both the detector and the spectrophotometer. Next, we turn on the red light to its dimmest setting detectable by the sensor. We record the electrical response from the sensor, but how do we use the UV-Vis output?
The UV-Vis spectrum will cover a span of wavelengths. We bin the wavelengths at a suitable size for the data. Now, we take a Riemann sum of the photon energies multiplied by the intensity for each bin and map this quantity to the electrical response of the sensor. When the photoreceptor is stimulated at this level, the map will return the photon energy flux for processing.
We continue to increase the red light level and mapping in this fashion until the detector saturates. Now, we have full calibration of the red channel. This calibration can be done on a continuous scale rather than incrementally like in this thought experiment.
We repeat this calibration for green and red. Furthermore, if you want your robots to see across a larger spectrum, such as infrared, for example, an IR spectrophotometer can be used for the mapping.
Once this mapping is complete and implemented, incident light falling on the sensor array(s) will return unique responses to the processing unit in proportion to the photon energy flux in each color region providing the numerical framework for composite color interpretation.
In this fashion, the robots will see the World in much the same way you do. Godspeed.
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