Initialization Problem of Service Robots with Artificial Stars

Many service robots which is interacting with human at home and in buildings have been developed. Few of them are shown in of the United States and of Japan. These robots are supposed to have a powerful indoor navigation performance in places where human beings live and work. The overall capability of service robots to move around in this environment is called environment correspondence, in which localization problem to find the accurate position and orientation is the most critical problem. While users set up a proper or a best environment for industrial robots, but for services robots at home and in buildings, it is very difficult to change the environment for robots. The expanded workspace due to mobility is difficult to be covered by means of those used for industrial robots because the cost increases and human beings do not want their environment to be changed for robots. This fact has made many researchers study efficient and effective environment correspondence problems. Among these problems, localization is the most difficult. Goal of localization study includes (1) Accurate detection of position and orientation (2) Minimum cost of the additional devices (3) Minimum change of human environment. In this study, as a solution of the above, we propose "Artificial Stars" which are attached on room ceiling as landmarks. In addition, we solve an adoption problem raised when a robot is delivered to a customer site and before it can perform its full navigation capability. We call this as "Initialization Problem" of service robots. We solve the initialization problem for both cases of environment with the map and without map. The proposed system is experimented and has shown how well it handles the initialization problem.