UvA-DARE ( Digital Academic Repository ) Robot companion localization at home and in the office

The abilities of mobile robots depend greatly on the performance of basic skills such as vision and localization. Although great progress has been made to explore and map extensive public areas with large holonomic robots on wheels, less attention is paid on the localization of a small robot companion in a confined environment as a room in office or at home. In this article, a localization algorithm for the popular Sony entertainment robot Aibo inside a room is worked out. This algorithm can provide localization information based on the natural appearance of the walls of the room. The algorithm starts making a scan of the surroundings by turning the head and the body of the robot on a certain spot. The robot learns the appearance of the surroundings at that spot by storing color transitions at different angles in a panoramic index. The stored panoramic appearance is used to determine the orientation (including a confidence value) relative to the learned spot for other points in the room. When multiple spots are learned, an absolute position estimate can be made. The applicability of this kind of localization is demonstrated in two environments: at home and in an office.