Active Vision for Door Localization and Door Opening using Playbot: A Computer Controlled Wheelchair for People with Mobility Impairments

Abstract

Playbot is a long-term, large-scale research project, whose goal is to provide a vision-based computer controlled wheelchair that enables children and adults with mobility impairments to become more independent. Within this context, we show how Playbot can actively search an indoor environment to localize a door, approach the door, use a mounted robotic arm to open the door, and go through the door, using exclusively vision-based sensors and without using a map of the environment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of active vision for localizing objects that are too large to fall within a single camerapsilas field of view and show that well-calibrated vision-based sensors are sufficient to safely pass through a door frame that is narrow enough to tolerate a wheelchair localization error of at most a few centimetres. We provide experimental results demonstrating near perfect performance in an indoor environment.