Facilities for sensing and modification of the environmentis crucial to delivery of robotics facilities that can interact with humansand objects in the environment. Both for recognition of objectsand interpretation of human activities (for instruction and avoidance)the by far most versatile sensory modality is computational vision.Use of vision for interpretation of human gestures and for manipulationof objects is outlined in this paper. It is here described how combinationof multiple visual cues can be used to achieve robustness andthe tradeoff between models and cue integration is illustrated. Thedescribed vision competences are demonstrated in the context of anintelligent service robot that operates in a regular domestic setting.