A Simple Interface for Mobile Robot Equipped with Single Camera using Motion Stereo Vision

Abstract

Recently, robot technology has gained popularity because of labor shortage, ability to work for long hours, etc. Remote-controlled robots are especially being put to practical use for several purposes such as conveying and security systems, etc. This is because their safety is higher than autonomous robots in addition to their easier development. However, remote-controlled robots require a user interface that can control the robot actions and show information captured by robot to the users. In this work, we develop a simple interface for mobile robots. In robot actions, movement of the robot itself is most important. To use this interface, the users need only point to the position on a screen where they want the robot to move to. After that, the interface controls the robot movement between the current and the target positions autonomously. Therefore, to move the robot to the selected point, the robot needs to calculate the target's 3D location. To calculate the 3D location, we use motion stereo vision that uses a single camera. Using this method, the interface can be applied to many robot systems. In this paper, we proved the effectiveness of the proposed method by performing experiments in real environments. demand a user interface which receives images from the robot and sends orders from the user to the robot. Currently, various devices and methods are used. However, they have several problems. For example, in a control method which sends commands such as FOWARD, ROTATION and STOP, it cannot control the minute movement of the robot. Additionally, another method using game controllers is difficult for new game users. A method using display of the images sent from the robot, directly displaying only the images is common. However, in this method, it is difficult for the user to get the depth of the objects. Moreover, if the distance to the object is too short, the user cannot see it. To solve the problem, an interface that shows the information of range sensors together with the image and one that shows overhead view from another camera mounted above are proposed. However, these methods are expensive and lack versatility.