Location Awareness, Orientation and Navigation: Lessons Learned from the SmartInside Project

This paper presents four experimental use cases for in- and outdoor navigation and orientation in the context of the European SmartInside project. The findings of the use cases are outlined and remaining research questions described. Author Keywords Navigation; orientation; mobile maps; location awareness

Location Awareness, Orientation and Navigation: Lessons Learned from the SmartInside Project

ABSTRACT This paper presents four studies on indoor/outdoor localization, orientation and navigation in the context of the European SmartInside project. The findings of the studies are outlined and remaining research questions are described

BIRON, where are you? - Enabling a robot to learn new places in a real home environment by integrating spoken dialog and visual localization

Spexard TP, Li S, Wrede B, et al. BIRON, where are you? - Enabling a robot to learn new places in a real home environment by integrating spoken dialog and visual localization. In: Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Beijing, P.R. China: IEEE; 2006: 934-940.An ambitious goal in modern robotic science is to build mobile robots that are able to interact as companions in real world environments. Especially for caretaking of elderly people a system robustly working at private homes is essential, requiring a very natural and human oriented way of communication. Since home environments are usually very individual a first task for a newly acquired robot is to get familiar with its new environment. This paper gives a short overview on how we integrated a vision based localization using the advantages of a very modular architecture and extending a spoken dialog system for online labeling and interaction about different locations. We present results from the integrated system working in a real, fully furnished home environment where it was able to learn the names of different rooms. This system enables us to perform real user studies in future without the need to fall back to Wizard-of-Oz experiments. Ongoing work aims at enabling the robot to take initiative by asking for unknown locations. A future extension is the ability to generalize over features of known rooms to make predictions when encountering unknown rooms