A vision system for detecting mobile robots in office environments

Abstract

Our goal is to develop a new vision system for detecting mobile robots and their motion sequences in office environments. The vision system watches a sequence of images acquired by the vision sensor, as well as a sequence of robot's command transmitted via a wireless network. To identify the robot, a sequence of motion is extracted for a moving object in the image sequence, and compared with the sequence of command. Simple features are used and extracted with various types of methods for detecting moving objects. This simplicity helps improve the robustness against unpredictable uncertainties inherent in the environments. In. order to improve recognition rate per frame, the vision system interacts with the robot, to learn features of the robot. A support vector machine (SVM) is used for this learning. In addition, the system is optimized reflecting characteristics of the robot and the environment.