Mobile Robots Facing the Real World 25pervious section, the perception and representation of the environment canbecome very complex.. Mobile Robots Facing the Real World 273.2 RoboX, the
Trang 1Mobile Robots Facing the Real World 23
in our Lab, that leads to locomotion concepts that perform extremely well in roughterrain, still being efficient and not very complex (fig 5 and 6)
2.2 Environment Representation
Environment perception and representation can be model- or behavior-based andmight involve different levels of abstraction (fig 2) Whereas behavior-basedapproaches are often combined with bio-inspired algorithms for adaptation and
Fig 3 3D representation of an indoor environment by planes The raw data (left) are
registered with an upward looking SICK laser scanner, whereas a horizontally arrangedlaser scanner is used for probabilistic localization of the robot during the measurement.Through the extraction of plans (right) from the 13157 raw data points, therepresentation can drastically be simplified to 27 planar regions, thus reducing memoryrequirement and complexity [15], and filtering unimportant information
Fig 2 This figure depicts the hierarchy of abstraction levels More we go up in the
hierarchy, more we reduce the geometric information and more we increase thedistinctiveness For global localization and mapping, high distinctiveness is ofimportance, whereas for local action, precise geometric relations with the environment come forward
Trang 224 R Siegwart
learning, they hardly scale with more complex task and have only shown their feasibility in simple experiments Model based approaches make use of a prioryknowledge by means of environment models, thus allow a very compact and task-dependant environment interpretation They scale much better with the complexity
of the system and task, but have some limitations with highly nonlinear systemsand unmodeled environment features However, today only model based controlapproaches enable predictivity of the systems behavior, thus guaranteeing safety.Models can have different level of abstraction, from raw-data based gridrepresentations up to highly symbolic descriptions of the environment (fig 2) Forreal world navigation, the complexity is a major issue Complexity, especially for localization and mapping, is strongly linked with the environment representation
We therefore strongly belief in a model based environment representation, thatdrastically reduces the memory requirements and complexity Furthermore, theuse of models of expected environment features enable to filter most measurement that are not relevant to the given navigation task, e.g people around the robot thatare not appropriate features for localization Representing a typical office room in2D by raw data based occupancy grids easily requires hundreds of k-bytes if a finegrid of some centimeters is used However, for localization purposes the sameroom can typically be represented by around 10 lines, thus requiring only around
20 to 40 bytes dependent of the requested resolution The same applies even moredrastically for 3D representations as presented in figure 3 [15] If lower precision
is required, one might even use a topological map using more abstract and distinctfeatures as the fingerprints presented in [16,17]
A major challenge for a useful environment perception and representation isthe inherent noise of sensor systems and the feature ambiguities that are present inmost environments Therefore probabilistic algorithms are adopted in order toextract useful information and to fuse the different signals and modalities to thebest estimate of the environment and the robots situation within it The currently most successful approaches employ Kalman filters [3] or Hidden Markov Models [1] for fusion and estimation The Kalman filter is well adapted if the environment
is represented in a continuous form by geometric features whereas Hidden Markov Models are typically used with metric grid maps or topological maps Bothapproaches have their advantages and disadvantages We therefore propose hybridapproaches, using a topological representation for the global map and a metricrepresentation based on geometric features for the local maps [18] Theseapproaches enable to combine global consistence, robustness, precision andapplicability for large environments
2.3 Navigation and Control Architecture
Navigation in real world environments is a very complex task It requires anappropriate control architecture implementing various parallel tasks in real time Atypical autonomous mobile robot system requires at least five control levels,running at different cycle times The main tasks ordered by importance are motor control, emergency supervision, obstacle avoidance, localization and planning ofthe task Apart the motor controller, all other control tasks require informationabout the local or even global environment of the robot As discussed in the
Trang 3Mobile Robots Facing the Real World 25
pervious section, the perception and representation of the environment canbecome very complex Thus the processing power to run these algorithms can beextremely high and therefore real-time implementation a real challenge Variousresearch projects address this problem with the goal to find new concepts andalgorithms for robust and practical navigation in real world environments [1,3].Today, feasible solutions for typical indoor or flat outdoor environments areavailable (e.g RoboX presented below) However, navigation in unstructured andrough terrain, where the environment has to be modeled in real 3D, is still a veryopen research area [4,5,6]
3 Examples
At the Autonomous Systems Lab at EPFL we conduct focused research in mobilerobotics for autonomous operation in real world environments Major axes are inthe field of mobile robot design for rough terrain, navigation and interaction, and
in mobile micro-robotics Among our most recent findings are enhanced featurebased localization concepts [3,9,8], obstacle avoidance for highly dynamic andhuman-cluttered environments, wheeled robots for high performance in roughterrain [12,4,10] and a mobile micro-robot of the size of a sugar cube [19].Recently we run one of the worlds largest mobile robot installations with eleven
fully autonomous and interactive mobile robots at the Swiss exhibition expo.02 It
represents a milestone in our mobile robotics research and allowed us a long-termevaluation of our recent findings Furthermore it was used to investigate social andpsychological issues of mobile robotics
In the following two research results are briefly presented and discussed
3.1 Wheel-Based Mobile Robot Locomotion for Rough Terrain
Wheels enable efficient motion on flat ground, and, if equipped with anappropriate suspension, can reach excellent climbing abilities In our Lab wetherefore investigate new passive and active wheel-based locomotion concepts.Passive means, that the articulations of the suspension have no actuators, whereasactive concepts use motors for at least some of the articulations of the suspensionsystem
Shrimp, presented in figure 4, is a passive system with 6 wheels [12] It caneffortlessly overcome obstacles up to two times of its wheel diameter and climbsregular steps of stairs that are about of its height Within a running researchproject for the European Space Agency, the system is extended for full energeticautonomy using solar cells, and equipped with a navigation system forautonomous long-range operation [4]
Octopus, shown in figure 5, features an active locomotion concept on 8wheels Its 6 active and one passive articulations enables the robot to keep allwheels in optimal ground contact at any time [10] A specially developed tactilewheel measures the contact point and force of each wheel
Trang 426 R Siegwart
Fig 5 Octopus features an active locomotion concept with 8 motorized and tactile
wheels, 6 active and 1 passive DOF for ground adaptation and on-board integration of allcontrol elements, joint sensors and inclinometers (Photo © Bramaz)
Fig 4 The robot Shrimp is an all-terrain rover based on a passive locomotion concept It
is characterized by 6 wheels suspended by parallel mechanisms, one fixed wheel in therear, two boogies on each side and one front wheel with spring suspension The robot sizes around 60 cm in length and 20 cm in height, is highly stable in rough terrain andovercomes obstacles up to 2 times its wheel diameter with a minimal friction coefficient
Trang 5Mobile Robots Facing the Real World 27
3.2 RoboX, the Tour-Guide Robot with Long-Term Experience [11]
The Swiss National Exhibition takes place once in 40 years The 2002 edition,
expo.02, ran from May 15 to October 21, 2002 It hosted the exhibition Robotics
that was intended to show the increasing closeness between man and robottechnology (fig 1) The central visitor experience of Robotics was the interactionwith eleven autonomous, freely navigating mobile robots on a surface of about
315 m2 Their main task was giving guided tours but included also a robot takingpictures of visitors The exhibition was scheduled for five hundred persons perhour For this task, the main specifications can be summarized as follows:
• Navigation in an unmodified, highly populated environment with visitors andother freely navigating robots
• Bi-directional multi-modal interaction using easy-to-use, intuitive yet typical interaction modalities
robot-• Speech output in four languages: French, German, Italian and English
• Safety for visitors and robots at all time
• Reliable operation during around eleven hours per day, seven days per week,during five months
• Minimal manual intervention and supervision
• Adaptive multi-robot coordination scenarios in function of the number ofvisitors and their interests
• Control of visitor flow through the robots
• Development of ten robots within tight budgets and schedules
The RoboX robot was designed and developed at our Lab by a disciplinary team of around 15 young engineers and artists (fig 6 and 7) It wasthen realized by our spin-off company BlueBotics It features fully autonomousnavigation, including feature-based localization [3], highly adaptive and dynamicobstacle avoidance [8] and multi robot coordination on the path planning level [2].The main interaction functions are face and people tracking, speech output, facialexpression through the two pan-tilt eyes and the eye-integrated LED matrix [11].Four touch buttons were used as input devices and two robots were equipped with
multi-a directionmulti-al microphone multi-and speech multi-anmulti-alysis for simple multi-answers
The navigation and interaction software, with around 20 main tasks, wasrunning on two embedded computers The safety-critical navigation software runs
on a XO/2 operating system based on Oberon [13] and the interaction software on
an industrial PC running Windows 2000 An additional security controller wasrunning on a PIC micro-controller, guaranteeing visitors safety at all time
The specially developed interaction software SOUL [20] aimed at composingthe scenarios like a theater or a music composition It enables through aconvenient interface to combine different basic behaviors with synthesized speech,motion, sensory inputs and much more
Trang 628 R Siegwart
Eleven robots were guiding visitors through the exhibition and interactingwith them in an environment cluttered by hundreds of visitors During the five-month exhibition, the RoboX family was in contact with 686'000 visitor andtraveled a total distance of 3'315 km The installation served also as research
Fig 6 a) The autonomous exhibition robot RoboX b) RoboX number 6 with visitors in
the pavilion at expo.02
Fig 7 Basic elements and functionalities of the tour-guide robot RoboX.
Trang 7Mobile Robots Facing the Real World 29
platform and technology demonstration Throughout the five-month operationperiod, the navigation system was close to 100% reliable This was especially due
to the localization system that was based on line feature [2], thus filtering out allthe dynamics in the environment coming from the visitors in the vicinity of therobot More details on the hardware design, the navigation system and thereliability can be found in [2,8,11,14]
4 Conclusions and Outlook
New concepts for wheeled locomotion, feature based environment representationand navigation have been presented and discussed in this paper Their potentialwas shown by two examples of mobile robots system of our Lab, facing thecomplexity of the real world They represent our recent findings, but are still only
a very first step towards intelligent and socially interactive robots In order torealize really intelligent mobile robots, able to scope with highly complex realworld environments, enormous research efforts in various fields like environmentrepresentation, cognition and learning are still required
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank all the current and past collaborators of theAutonomous Systems Lab for their contributions and inspiring work, theircuriosity and dedication for mobile robotics research The presented projects weremainly funded by EPFL, the European Space Agency (ESA) and expo.02
References
1 S Thrun, D Fox, W Burgard, and F Dellaert, "Robust Monte Carlo Localization forMobile Robots," In Artificial Intelligence (AI), 2001
2 Arras, K.O., Philippsen, R., Tomatis, N., de Battista, M., Schilt, M and Siegwart, R.,
"A Navigation Framework for Multiple Mobile Robots and its Application at theExpo.02 Exhibition," in Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference onRobotics and Automation (ICRA'03), Taipei, Taiwan, 2003
3 Arras, K.O., Castellanos, J.A and Siegwart, R., Feature-Based Multi-HypothesisLocalization and Tracking for Mobile Robots Using Geometric Constraints InProceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation(ICRA’02), Washington DC, USA, May 11 - 15 2002
4 Lamon, P and Siegwart, R., "3D-Odometry for rough terrain – Towards real 3Dnavigation." In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics andAutomation (ICRA'03), Taipei, Taiwan, 2003
5 Singh S., Simmons R., Smith T., Stentz A., Verma V., Yahja A., Schwehr K., "Recent Progress in Local and Global Traversability for Planetary Rovers", Proceedings ofIEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’00), p1194-1200,San Francisco, April 2000
6 A Mallet, S Lacroix, and L Gallo, "Position estimation in outdoor environmentsusing pixel tracking and stereovision", Proceedings of IEEE International Conference
on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’00), pages 3519-3524, San Francisco, CA (USA),April 2000
7 Fong T., Nourbakhsh I., Dautenhahn K., "A survey of social interactive robots,"Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 42, 143-166, 2003
Trang 830 R Siegwart
8 Philippsen, R and Siegwart, R., "Smooth and Efficient Obstacle Avoidance for a Tour Guide Robot," In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics andAutomation, (ICRA’03), Taipei, Taiwan, 2003
9 Tomatis, N., Nourbakhsh, I and Siegwart, R., "Hybrid Simultaneous Localization andMap Building: Closing the Loop with Multi-Hypotheses Tracking," In Proceedings ofthe IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’02),Washington DC, USA, May 11 - 15, 2002
10 Lauria, M., Piguet, Y and Siegwart, R., "Octopus - An Autonomous WheeledClimbing Robot," In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Climbingand Walking Robots Published by Professional Engineering Publishing Limited, Bury
St Edmunds and London, UK, 2002
11 Siegwart R., et al., "Robox at Expo.02: A Large Scale Installation of Personal Robots,"Special issue on Socially Interactive Robots, Robotics and Autonomous Systems 42 (3-4), 31 March 2003
12 Siegwart R., Lamon P., Estier T., Lauria M., Piguet R., "Innovative Design forWheeled Locomotion in Rough Terrain," Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Elsevier Sep 2002, Vol 40/2-3, pp 151-162
13 Brega, R., N Tomatis, K Arras, and Siegwart R., "The Need for Autonomy and Time in Mobile Robotics: A Case Study of XO/2 and Pygmalion," IEEE/RSJInternational Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS’00), Takamatsu,Japan, 2000
Real-14 Siegwart, R., Arras, K.O., Jensen, B., Philippsen, R and Tomatis, N., "Design,Implementation and Exploitation of a New Fully Autonomous Tour Guide Robot," InProceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Advances in Service Robotics(ASER'2003), Bardolino, Italy, 13-15 March 2003
15 Weingarten, J., Gruener, G and Siegwart, R, "A Fast and Robust 3D FeatureExtraction Algorithm for Structured Environment Reconstruction," Proceedings of11th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, Portugal, July 2003
16 Lamon, P., I Nourbakhsh, et al., "Deriving and Matching Image Fingerprint Sequences for Mobile Robot Localization," Proc of IEEE International Conference onRobotics and Automation (ICRA), Seoul, Korea, 2001
17 Lamon, P., Tapus A., et al., "Environmental Modeling with Fingerprint Sequences forTopological Global Localization" - submitted at IROS’03, Las Vegas, USA, 2003
18 Tomatis N., Nourbakhsh I and Siegwart R., "Hybrid Simultaneous Localization andMap Building: Closing the Loop with Multi-Hypotheses Tracking." In Proceedings ofthe IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’02),Washington DC, USA, May 11 - 15, 2002
19 Caprari G., Estier T., Siegwart R.: "Fascination of Down Scaling - Alice the SugarCube Robot, Journal of Micro-Mechatronics," VSP, Utrecht 2002, Vol 1, No 3, pp.177-189
20 Jensen, B., Froidevaux, G., Greppin, X., Lorotte, A., Mayor, L., Meisser, M., Ramel,
G and Siegwart, R (2003) "Multi-Robot Human-Interation and Visitor Flow Management," In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics andAutomation (ICRA’03), Taipei, Taiwan, 2003
Trang 9Breakthroughs in Human Technology Interaction
Bernd Reuse
Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany
Abstract In 1999 the German Federal Government launched six major strategic
collabora-tive research projects on Human Technology Interaction, which involved 102 research ners and a funding volume of 82 million The results of these projects were expected to al-low people to control technical systems multimodally by using natural forms of interactionsuch as speech, gestures, facial expressions, touch and visualization methods and to apply such systems for the most varied purposes in their private and working environments Theambitious research goals were achieved with prototypes for real-world applications Re-search activities have resulted in 116 patent applications, 56 spin-off products and 13 spin-off companies as well as 860 scientific publications
part-1 Introduction: Trends in Human Technology
Interaction
Together with the Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour (BMWA), the eral Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) organized an international statusconference in Berlin in June 2003, where the results of four years of government-funded research on Human Technology Interaction (HTI) were presented(www.dlr.de/pt-dlr/sw)
Fed-Distinguished personalities from science, research and industry participated inthis conference The roughly 350 conference participants from Germany andabroad agreed on the following trends in Human Technology Interaction:
• Human Computer Interaction is turning into Human Computer Cooperation andwill support many trends in I&C The number of transactions is increasing dra-matically and requires new modalities in HTI Access to any information withany device at any place and at any time will be supported by HTI interfaces.Agents will take over routine work
• A simple and easy-to-handle Human Computer Interface is an important condition for marketing the products of the IT industry
pre-• Human Computer Interaction can help solve the problems of the future, namely the problems of the aging society An intelligent human life has to be supported
by science and technology
S Yuta et al (Eds.): Field and Service Robotics, STAR 24, pp 31–38, 2006.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006
Trang 1032 B Reuse
• Human Computer Interaction will have a strong influence on society as a whole
as a result of the convergence of the use of computers in private and business environments, of working life and leisure time, and of paid and unpaid work
2 The Verbmobil Project
After 20 years of largely unsuccessful research in the field of speech recognition,which had only produced simple dialogue systems, the BMBF decided in 1993 toprovide a total of approximately 60 million for an eight-year research project enti-
tled Verbmobil which was to deal with the automatic recognition and translation
of spontaneous speech in dialogue situations This was not in line with the thenprevailing trend in research, and even some of the international experts who wereinvolved took the view that the goal could not be achieved at that time
But in the Verbmobil project we pursued new paths in research: first of all, tering the complexity of spontaneous speech with all its phenomena such as vague-ness, ambiguities, self-corrections, hesitations and disfluencies took priority over the envisaged vocabulary Another novel feature was that researchers used the in-formation contained in the prosody of speech for speech recognition purposes Inaddition, the transfer included knowledge processing, which is indispensable intranslation The 135 different work packages and 35 research groups distributedthroughout Germany were linked by a network management led by ProfessorWahlster of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) inSaarbrücken
mas-As a result of Verbmobil it was possible to demonstrate in July 2000 the tion of spontaneous speech for the domain of the remote maintenance of PCs using30,000 words and for a telephone translation system with 10,000 words for transla-tion from German into English and with 3,000 words for translation from Germaninto Japanese In addition Verbmobil generated 20 spin-off products, 8 spin-offcompanies and about 800 scientific publications In 2001, Verbmobil receivedFederal President Rau's German Future Award, the highest German researchaward
transla-3 Lead Projects on Human Technology Interaction
In 1999 the Federal Government started an initiative on Human Technology action, the central goal being to extend the findings and models of the Verbmobilproject concerning speech-based human interaction with computers to cover thefull range of human forms of interaction
Inter-It was expected that the consideration and integration of several forms of action would allow a much better interpretation of the user's intention than one
Trang 11inter-Breakthroughs in Human Technology Interaction 33 modality alone This initial view has now been confirmed on a global scale at rele-vant international conferences.
Fig 1 Aspects of multimodal interaction
The Federal Government therefore staged an ideas competition on HumanTechnology Interaction Altogether 89 outline proposals involving 800 cooperationpartners from science and industry were submitted In a two-tier process, interna-tional experts selected six major strategic and interdisciplinary collaborative re-search projects (lead projects) involving 102 partners from science and industry.These projects were supported with 82.4 million in government funds (to whichindustry added 69.7 million of its own funds) between July 1999 and September 2003
The results of the projects were expected to allow people to control technicalsystems multimodally by using natural forms of interaction such as speech, ges-tures, facial expressions, touch and visualization methods and to apply such sys-tems for the most varied purposes in their private and working environments Theaim was to adapt technology to people and not vice versa as has been the case inthe past Ergonomics and user acceptance of the various forms of interaction weremajor criteria for the development of prototypes which should not only be highlyattractive from the scientific viewpoint but should also have a great market poten-tial
The following is an overview of the projects that were carried out It should benoted that a basic-science project entitled SMARTKOM succeeded in generalizingthe advanced discourse models for spoken dialogue to cover the full spectrum ofmultimodal discourse phenomena The other projects covered the entire range frombasic to applied research but were clearly more application-oriented
Trang 12ges-• Situation-based understanding of vague, ambiguous or incomplete multimodalinput at the semantic and pragmatic level
• Development of a Meaning Representation Language M3L
ARVIKA: Augmented Reality (AR) for Development, Production and vices (www.arvika.de) The computer in your spectacles - mobile action in mixed
Ser-real and virtual future-oriented working environments Situation-related tion is displayed to service engineers on the spot (22 project partners; projectleader: Siemens AG, Nürnberg) Highlights:
informa-• First prototypes of mobile Augmented Reality systems for industrial tions in development, production and service
applica-• Remote Augmented Reality support for service processes
EMBASSI: Multimodal Assistance for Infotainment and Service tures (www.embassi.de) Multimodal remote control for all electronic appliances
Infrastruc-in everyday life ensures clear and Infrastruc-intelligent user Infrastruc-interfaces and operatInfrastruc-ing Infrastruc-tions Individually adaptable access to public terminal systems is possible (18 pro-ject partners; project leader: Grundig AG, Nürnberg) Highlights:
instruc-• Living room of the future – multimodal assistance in the selection of ment programmes and the control of living room equipment
entertain-• Adaptive driver assistance for significantly increasing traffic safety
INVITE: Intuitive Human Computer Interaction for the Interlaced tion World of the Future (www.invite.de) Multimedial, multimodal and multi-
Informa-locational team work - tools for an innovative exchange of information and edge Implicit recording of information for customer advice and support (20 projectpartners; project leader: ISA GmbH, Stuttgart) Highlights:
knowl-• Exploration and extraction of knowledge structures by integration of speechrecognition, text mining and ontology building
• Interaction and collaborative data representation in immersive and distributed3D-environments
MAP (BMWA): Multimedia Workplace of the Future (www.map21.de) New
technical solutions for mobile activities through integration of multimodal tion functions, new assistance systems, agent technologies and multimedia meth-ods (15 project partners; project leader: Alcatel SEL AG, Stuttgart) Highlights:
Trang 13interac-Breakthroughs in Human Technology Interaction 35
• Secure mobile agent systems for personal assistance in stationary and mobileworking situations
• Delegating tasks, appointment negotiations by personal agents
MORPHA: Intelligent service robots to interact and collaborate with human users (www.morpha.de) Mobile service robots are advancing - mainly in private
households and in long-term care Robots working in human environments or teracting with people must be able to recognize people and adapt their movements
in-to suit them It must be possible in-to teach robots quickly and intuitively throughgestures and demonstration (17 project partners; project leaders: Delmia GmbH,Fellbach, FAW, Ulm) Highlights:
• New interactive programming paradigms for robots through seamless tion of tactile, gesture and speech channels, programming by touch
integra-• Reactive, collision-free motion generation for housekeeping and manufacturingassistance
3.1 Selected Demonstrators
The projects produced a total of 150 demonstrators; four of them are presented inthe following:
SMARTKOM developed systems which allow the speech-based sending of
e-mails and selection of music on demand using MP3 over the Internet from a ning car
run-Fig 2 SMARTKOM: Sending email from a driving car
ARVIKA developed an innovative cabling method for the Airbus Instead of
con-necting the hundreds or thousands of cables in aircraft or other technical systems
by using cable lists, engineers will in future be able to find the right connection viaAugmented Reality by speech control of cable numbers
Trang 1436 B Reuse
Fig 3 ARVIKA: Connecting cables in airplanes with AR support
INVITE developed a system which is based on speech processing and can extract
the content of a conversation between several participants and present it in a graph.This graph is generated while the device is listening; the information it contains can be used for further purposes, e.g for identifying the points of the conversationwhich have or have not been settled
Fig 4 INVITE: Exploration and Extraction of Knowledge Structures: Goals and Concepts
Trang 15Breakthroughs in Human Technology Interaction 37
MORPHA developed a service robot for the domestic environment which can
ful-fil many functions that are needed by elderly or disabled persons in their privatesphere, e.g it can offer drinks, assist them in walking and carrying, and providecommunication support
Fig 5 MORPHA: Interaction and communication with robot assistants
4 Results of the Lead Projects on Human Technology
Interaction
The lead projects on Human Technology Interaction have produced a considerablenumber of results which are of great scientific and commercial importance A sci-entific advisory board with international membership confirmed the overwhelmingsuccess of the HTI programme and pointed to the considerable progress made byresearch in the field of Human Technology Interaction(http://informatiksysteme.pt-it.de/mti-2)
Trang 1638 B Reuse
Fig 6 Commerical and scientific results
The BMBF has so far organized four events together with German industry inorder to promote the quick transfer of the results yielded by the research projects.The BMBF and BMWA will present these results to an international public at theCeBIT 2004 in Hannover (March 18 to 24), where they have reserved an area ofabout 1000 square meters in exhibition hall 11 (research)
Owing to this big success, the topics of the German lead projects on HumanTechnology Interaction have been included in the EU's Sixth Research FrameworkProgramme
Expression of thanks:
My special thanks go to the DLR project management group in Berlin Adlershof,above all to Dr Grote and Dr Krahl
Trang 17S Yuta et al (Eds.): Field and Service Robotics, STAR 24, pp 41–49, 2006.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006
Indoor Navigation for Mobile Robot by Using
Environment-Embedded Local Information
Management Device and Optical Pointer
Tsuyoshi Suzuki1, Taiki Uehara2, Kuniaki Kawabata3, Daisuke Kurabayashi4, Igor E.Paromtchik3, and Hajime Asama3
1 Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Tokyo Denki University,2-2, Kanda-Nishiki-Cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 101-8457, JAPAN
tszk@ieee.org
2 EPSON KOWA Corp., Ueda, Nagano, JAPAN
3 The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Wako, Saitama, JAPAN
4 Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro, Tokyo, JAPAN
Abstract The paper discusses a new hybrid navigation strategy for mobile robots operating
in indoor environment using the Information Assistant (IA) system and the Optical Pointer(OP) For intelligent navigation, the robots need a static and global information describing
a topological map such as positional relation from any starting position to any goal positionfor making a path plan as well as dynamic and local information including local map,obstacles, traffic information for navigation control We propose a method for managing theinformation The robot has only rough path information to the goal, and the IAs, whichare small communication devices installed in the environment, manage real environmentinformation, locally The OP is used for guidance of a robot in the junctions such as crossing,which communicates with mobile robots through IA and indicates their target positions bymeans of a light projection from a laser pointer onto the ground The mobile robot allows itand run after the laser light beacon and reaches the destination The robot can navigate to thegoal efficiently by using these systems
1 Introduction
In recent years, an application range of a robot is spreading to general indoorenvironment with many indefinite elements from limited condition environmentsuch like in a factory where the industrial robots are used In such a background,
it is important subject for a mobile robot research to be navigated a robot to a goalcorrectly Although, there are many research for robot navigation[e.g.1], the robot isbeforehand given a detailed map in almost all researches In such methods, however,
it is difficult to cope flexibly according to problems which occur in the situation ofchanging every moment Management of the information according to every change
of the environment is also difficult
The paper discusses a new navigation method for multiple mobile robots operating inindoor environment In order to realize a flexible navigation, a management method
of environment information is considered For intelligent navigation, the robots needtwo types of environment information That is, they are static and global information