1. A system for automatically locating and identifying an object in an environment, the system comprising: at least one sensor to acquire sensor data representing of at least a portion of the object; a spatial attention module, operably coupled to the at least one sensor, to produce a foveated representation of the object based at least in part on the sensor data, to track a position of the object within the environment based at least in part on the foveated representation, and to select another portion of the environment to be sensed by the at least one sensor based at least in part on the foveated representation of the object; and a semantics module, operably coupled to the spatial attention module, to determine an identity of the object based at least in part on the foveated representation of the object.