Yoonseok Pyo

Floor Sensing System Using Laser Reflectivity for Localizing Everyday Objects and Robot

This paper describes a new method of measuring the position of everyday objects and a robot on the floor using distance and reflectance acquired by laser range finder (LRF). The information obtained by this method is important for a service robot working in a human daily life environment. Our method uses only one LRF together with a mirror installed on the wall. Moreover, since the area of sensing is limited to a LRF scanning plane parallel to the floor and just a few centimeters above the floor, the scanning covers the whole room with minimal invasion of privacy of a resident, and occlusion problem is mitigated by using mirror. We use the reflection intensity and position information obtained from the target surface. Although it is not possible to identify all objects by additionally using reflection values, it would be easier to identify unknown objects if we can eliminate easily identifiable objects by reflectance. In addition, we propose a method for measuring the robots pose using the tag which has the encoded reflection pattern optically identified by the LRF. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Service robot system with an informationally structured environment

Daily life assistance is one of the most important applications for service robots. For comfortable assistance, service robots must recognize the surrounding conditions correctly, including human motion, the position of objects, and obstacles. However, since the everyday environment is complex and unpredictable, it is almost impossible to sense all of the necessary information using only a robot and sensors attached to it. In order to realize a service robot for daily life assistance, we have been developing an informationally structured environment using distributed sensors embedded in the environment. The present paper introduces a service robot system with an informationally structured environment referred to the ROS-TMS. This system enables the integration of various data from distributed sensors, as well as storage of these data in an on-line database and the planning of the service motion of a robot using real-time information about the surroundings. In addition, we discuss experiments such as detection and fetch-and-give tasks using the developed real environment and robot. Introduction of architecture and components of the ROS-TMS.Integration of various data from distributed sensors for service robot system.Object detection system (ODS) using RGB-D camera.Motion planning for a fetch-and-give task using a wagon and a humanoid robot.Handing over an object to a human using manipulability of both a robot and a human.

An Informationally Structured Room for Robotic Assistance

The application of assistive technologies for elderly people is one of the most promising and interesting scenarios for intelligent technologies in the present and near future. Moreover, the improvement of the quality of life for the elderly is one of the first priorities in modern countries and societies. In this work, we present an informationally structured room that is aimed at supporting the daily life activities of elderly people. This room integrates different sensor modalities in a natural and non-invasive way inside the environment. The information gathered by the sensors is processed and sent to a centralized management system, which makes it available to a service robot assisting the people. One important restriction of our intelligent room is reducing as much as possible any interference with daily activities. Finally, this paper presents several experiments and situations using our intelligent environment in cooperation with our service robot.

The Intelligent Room for Elderly Care

Daily life assistance for elderly is one of the most promising and interesting scenarios for advanced technologies in the near future. Improving the quality of life of elderly is also some of the first priorities in modern countries and societies where the percentage of elder people is rapidly increasing due mainly to great improvements in medicine during the last decades. In this paper, we present an overview of our informationally structured room that supports daily life activities of elderly with the aim of improving their quality of life. Our environment contains different distributed sensors including a floor sensing system and several intelligent cabinets. Sensor information is sent to a centralized management system which processes the data and makes it available to a service robot which assists the people in the room. One important restriction in our intelligent environment is to maintain a small number of sensors to avoid interfering with the daily activities of people and to reduce as much as possible the invasion of their privacy. In addition we discuss some experiments using our real environment and robot.

Immersive VR interface for informationally structured environment

This paper presents a new immersive VR interface bridging cyber and physical worlds for Cyber Physical System (CPS). Informationally structured environment (ISE) has been proposed in service robotics so far. In ISE, environmental information such as positions of objects, furniture, humans, and robots is gathered by embedded sensor networks and stored in a database structurally. A service robot is able to utilize these information anytime and anywhere by connecting to the network. In this paper, we introduce the ISE architecture named ROS-TMS and a new cyber-physical interface for ROS-TMS. The proposed system consists of an immersive wearable display, a stereo camera, an optical tracking system, and an environmental simulator, and is able to present forecasted images with high reality based on the structured information in ISE.

Motion planning for fetch-and-give task using wagon and service robot

Daily life assistance for elderly individuals in hospitals and care facilities is one of the most urgent and promising applications for service robots. Especially, a fetch-and-give task is a frequent and fundamental task for service robots to assist elderlys daily life. In hospitals and care facilities, this task is often performed with a movable platform such as a wagon or a cart to carry and deliver a large amount of objects at once. Thus the navigation and control of not only a service robot but also a movable platform must be planned safely. In addition, a robot motion planning to hand over an object to a person safely and comfortably according to his/her posture is also an important problem in this task, however this has not been discussed so much. In this work, we present a coordinate motion planning technique for a fetch-and-give task using a wagon and a service robot. Handover motion is also planned by considering the manipulability of both a robot and a person. Experiments of a fetch-and-give task using a service robot are successfully carried out.

Control architecture for service drone in informationally structured environment

In this paper, we present a control architecture that enables a service drone to navigate in an informationally structured environment (ISE) and to accomplish a specific service task autonomously based on the ROS-TMS framework. The ROS-TMS is a ROS-based distributed information management system for ISE. It manages a variety of subsystems ranging from sensing by distributed sensors to motion planning and behavior control for service robots. The proposed architecture is designed as a component of the ROS-TMS, and consists of a navigation system that solves a path planning in ISE and a flight control system by a behavior-based finite state machine. The navigation of the drone is allowed by an optical motion tracking system consisting of distributed infrared cameras managed by the ROS-TMS. A graphical user interface is designed to provide simple manipulation of a service task by a drone. Service experiments have been conducted to validate the performance of the architecture.

Measurement and estimation of indoor human behavior of everyday life based on floor sensing with minimal invasion of privacy

This paper describes a method of measurement and estimation of human behaviors in a room together with the layout of objects on the floor. The information obtained by the method is essential for a service robot working in a human daily life environment. The method uses only one laser range finder (LRF) installed in the room and a strip of mirror attached to a side wall close to a floor. The area of sensing is limited to a plane parallel to and just a few centimeters above the floor, thus covering the whole room with minimal invasion of privacy of a resident while reducing occlusion. Processing both distance and reflectance acquired by the LRF from the surface of the existing objects allows us to exclude immediately distinguishable clusters and to focus on the analysis of remaining clusters. The human behavior models that we propose are effectively used to estimate human behavior based on the limited LRF data. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Feasibility study of IoRT platform “Big Sensor Box”

This paper proposes new software and hardware platforms named ROS-TMS and Big Sensor Box, respectively, for an informationally structured environment. We started the development of a management system for an informationally structured environment named Town Management System (TMS) in the Robot Town Project in 2005. Since then we have been continuing our efforts to improve performance and to enhance TMS functions. Recently, we launched a new version of TMS named ROS-TMS, which resolves some critical problems in TMS by adopting the Robot Operating System (ROS) and utilizing the high scalability and numerous resources of ROS. In this paper, we first discuss the structure of a software platform for the informationally structured environment and describe in detail our latest system, ROS-TMS version 4.0. Next, we introduce a hardware platform for the informationally structured environment named Big Sensor Box, in which a variety of sensors are embedded and service robots are operated according to the structured information under the management of ROS-TMS. Robot service experiments including a fetch-and-give task and autonomous control of a wheelchair robot are also conducted in Big Sensor Box.

1A1-O03 Proposal of fourth-person sensing for service robots

This paper proposes a new concept of ”fourth-person sensing” for service robots. The proposed concept combines wearable cameras (the first-person viewpoint), sensors mounted on robots (the second-person viewpoint) and sensors embedded in the informationally structured environment (the third-person viewpoint). Each sensor has its advantage and disadvantage, while the proposed concept can compensate the disadvantages by combining the advantages of all sensors. The proposed concept can be used to understand a user’s intention and context of the scene with high accuracy, thus it enables to provide proactive services by service robots. As one of applications of the proposed concept, we developed a HCI system combines the first-person sensing and the third-person one. We show the effectiveness of the proposed concepts through experiments.