A human care system by a mobile robot employing cooperative objects recognition

Abstract

This paper proposes a system for caring a physically impaired person by a mobile robot employing cooperative object recognition. It is a well-known fact that object recognition is not an easy task for a robot particularly in a real environment. It is, on the contrary, easy for a human. In the proposed system, a mobile robot goes to a spot where a user wishes to go in place of him/her and transfers images containing various objects in the spot. Having seen the images, the user chooses one of those objects and sends a request to the robot to get it. The robot performs the request by taking and bringing it back to the user. As an example, the robot is asked to go to a store, buy goods which a user wants and bring them back to the user. In this process, the goods in the captured images are segmented by the robot and they are recognized and one of them is chosen by the user. In this way, cooperative object recognition is realized to achieve a certain purpose. A laboratory experiment was done with promising results. The idea is different from remote control of a mobile robot, because the robot is autonomous and a user takes a role of only recognizing objects and sending his/her request to the robot.