This Far, No Further: Introducing Virtual Borders to Mobile Robots Using a Laser Pointer

We address the problem of controlling the workspace of a 3-DoF mobile robot. In a human-robot shared space, robots should navigate in a human-acceptable way according to the users' demands. For this purpose, we employ virtual borders, that are non-physical borders, to allow a user the restriction of the robot's workspace. To this end, we propose an interaction method based on a laser pointer to intuitively define virtual borders. This interaction method uses a previously developed framework based on robot guidance to change the robot's navigational behavior. Furthermore, we extend this framework to increase the flexibility by considering different types of virtual borders, i.e. polygons and curves separating an area. We evaluated our method with 15 non-expert users concerning correctness, accuracy and teaching time. The experimental results revealed a high accuracy and linear teaching time with respect to the border length while correctly incorporating the borders into the robot's navigational map. Finally, our user study showed that non-expert users can employ our interaction method.Comment: Accepted at 2019 Third IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing (IRC), supplementary video: https://youtu.be/lKsGp8xtyI

Virtual Borders: Accurate Definition of a Mobile Robot's Workspace Using Augmented Reality

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.Comment: Accepted on 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), supplementary video: https://youtu.be/oQO8sQ0JBR

A Framework for Interactive Teaching of Virtual Borders to Mobile Robots

The increasing number of robots in home environments leads to an emerging coexistence between humans and robots. Robots undertake common tasks and support the residents in their everyday life. People appreciate the presence of robots in their environment as long as they keep the control over them. One important aspect is the control of a robot's workspace. Therefore, we introduce virtual borders to precisely and flexibly define the workspace of mobile robots. First, we propose a novel framework that allows a person to interactively restrict a mobile robot's workspace. To show the validity of this framework, a concrete implementation based on visual markers is implemented. Afterwards, the mobile robot is capable of performing its tasks while respecting the new virtual borders. The approach is accurate, flexible and less time consuming than explicit robot programming. Hence, even non-experts are able to teach virtual borders to their robots which is especially interesting in domains like vacuuming or service robots in home environments.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Sensor system for development of perception systems for ATO

Developing AI systems for automatic train operation (ATO) requires developers to have a deep understanding of the human tasks they are trying to replace. This paper fills this gap and translates the regulatory requirements from the context of German railways for the AI developer community. As a result, tasks such as train’s path monitoring for collision prediction, signal detection, door operation, etc. are identified. Based on this analysis, a functionally justified sensor setup with detailed configuration requirements is presented. This setup was also evaluated by a survey within the railway industry. The evaluated sensors include RGB/IR cameras, LIDARs, radars and ultrasonic sensors. Calculations and estimates for the evaluated sensors are presented graphically and included in this paper. However, the ultimate sensor setup is still a subject of research. The results of this paper also address the lack of training and test datasets for railway AI systems. It is proposed to acquire research datasets that will allow the training of domain adaptation algorithms to transform other datasets, thus increasing the number of available datasets. The sensor setup is also recommended for such research datasets.</jats:p

Onboard Sensor Systems for Automatic Train Operation

This paper introduces the specific requirements of the domain of train operation and its regulatory framework to the AI community. It assesses sensor sets for driverless and unattended train operation. It lists functionally justified ranges of technical specifications for sensors of different types, which will generate input for AI perception algorithms (i.e. for signal and obstacle detection). Since an optimal sensor set is the subject of research, this paper provides the specification of a generic data acquisition platform as a crucial step. Some particular results are recommendations for the minimal resolution and shutter type for image sensors, as well as beam steering methods and resolutions for LiDARs