Furniture Model Creation Through Direct Teaching to a Mobile Robot

Abstract

In this paper, a modeling method to handle furniture is proposed. Real-life environments are crowded with objects such as drawers and cabinets that, while easily dealt with by people, present mobile robots with problems. While it is to be hoped that robots will assist in multiple daily tasks such as putting objects in into drawers, the major problems lies in providing robots with knowledge about the environment efficiently and, if possible, autonomously. If mobile robots can handle these furniture autonomously, it is expected that multiple daily jobs, for example, storing a small object in a drawer, can be performed by the robots. However, it is a perplexing process to give several pieces of knowledge about the furniture to the robots manually. In our approach, by utilizing sensor data from a camera and a laser range finder which are combined with direct teaching, a handling model can be created not only how to handle the furniture but also an appearance and 3D shape. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our methods.