Virtual Borders: Accurate Definition of a Mobile Robot's Workspace Using Augmented Reality
This addresses the need for intuitive control of mobile robots in shared spaces like homes, though it is incremental as it builds on existing human-robot interaction methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling non-expert users to control mobile robot workspaces for human-aware navigation by introducing virtual borders defined via an augmented reality interface, showing that it achieves high accuracy while significantly reducing teaching time compared to baseline methods.
We address the problem of interactively controlling the workspace of a mobile robot to ensure a human-aware navigation. This is especially of relevance for non-expert users living in human-robot shared spaces, e.g. home environments, since they want to keep the control of their mobile robots, such as vacuum cleaning or companion robots. Therefore, we introduce virtual borders that are respected by a robot while performing its tasks. For this purpose, we employ a RGB-D Google Tango tablet as human-robot interface in combination with an augmented reality application to flexibly define virtual borders. We evaluated our system with 15 non-expert users concerning accuracy, teaching time and correctness and compared the results with other baseline methods based on visual markers and a laser pointer. The experimental results show that our method features an equally high accuracy while reducing the teaching time significantly compared to the baseline methods. This holds for different border lengths, shapes and variations in the teaching process. Finally, we demonstrated the correctness of the approach, i.e. the mobile robot changes its navigational behavior according to the user-defined virtual borders.