Implementation of Adaptive Movement Control for Waiter Robot using Visual Information

Robovie-R2 [1], developed by ATR, is a 110cm high, 60kg weight, two wheel drive, human like robot. It has two arms with dynamic fingers. It also has a position sensitive detector sensor and two cameras as eyes on his head for recognizing his surrounding environment. Recent years, we have carried out a project to integrate new functions into Robovie-R2 so as to make it possible to be used in a dining room in healthcare center for helping serving meal for elderly. As a new function, we have developed software system for adaptive movement control of Robovie-R2 that is primary important since a robot that cannot autonomously control its movement would be a dangerous object to the people in dining room. We used the cameras on Robovie-R2's head to catch environment images, applied our original algorithm for recognizing obstacles such as furniture or people, so as to control Roboie-R2's movement. In this paper, we will focus our algorithm and its results.