The perception of the three-dimensional world immediately around the body has a strong interactive and motoric component, being a complete and operative cognition of visual space achievable only through active exploration of it: the natural effectors of this cognition are the eyes and the arms. Moving from that, the EYESHOTS project <"http://www.eyeshots.it">LINK<, funded under the EC FP7 and just ended in March 2011, has specifically investigated the tight interplay existing between vision and motion control, and how to exploit this interaction to achieve a knowledge of the surrounding environment that allows a robot to act properly. In this way, robot perception can be flexibly integrated with its own actions and, eventually, the understanding of planned actions of humans in a shared workspace.
In the first part of the talk, I will summarize the key assets of the project highlighting some results from an integrated perspective to perception and action. In the second part, I will specifically focus on interactive stereopsis paradigms defending an early visuomotor approach to 3D perception, where we look for instantiations of visuomotor optimization principles concurrently with the design of distributed neural models/architectures that can efficiently embody them. The advantages of binocular visuomotor strategies, indeed, can be fully understood only if one jointly analyzes and models the problem of neural computation of stereo information, and if one takes into account the limited accuracy of the motor system. Case-studies will be presented to show the potentiality of a biologically-inspired distributed vision architecture as a flexible medium on which to implement coding/decoding adaptation mechanisms related to sensorimotor schema.