Selecting efficient views for visualizing robot motions

Abstract

Many robots are used for cleaning, patrolling, and exploring in an indoor environment. At present, however, the ability of the robots to adapt to the environment is poor, thus they often fail in the recognition of the environment when they are in unexpected situations. In order to recover the failure, a skilled person has to monitor the robot while the robot works. One of the methods to reduce the cost of monitoring is to use a remote control system. Especially it is useful to visualize a history of the robot motions, as well as regions the robot passed through. We describe a method to indicate the history information by superimposing robot trajectories onto a sequence of sensor images. The method automatically selects images to be indicated by controlling three parameters: area of the view, precision of the indication and the number of images. The method also allows users to determine the parameters manually. Moreover, we apply the method to a floor cleaning robot system, and show that swept areas are visualized efficiently.