Development of an Environment Recognition System for Multiple Mobile Robots Controlled by a Human

Abstract This paper deals with an environmental recognition method for operation of multiple mobile robots. Until now. we have been developing a system for multiple mobile robot operation by a single human user. In order that the user operates multiple robots appropriately. he/she must know information of an environment around the robots. Hence we build a virtual environment and show it to the user. To build the virtual environment. we must solve two problems; object recognition and self-positioning. Concerning the former. the two robots. each equipped with a monocular camera, acquire a 3-dimensional position of a point within an environment with stereovision method. As for the latter. markers are placed on the robots so that their relative positions can be measured. In each phase mentioned above, the human user gives commands to the robots appropriately. After the problems mentioned above are solved. the virtual environment can be constructed with the environmental information. The virtual environment displays remote site information to the user. Experiment shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.