Development of personal robot

Abstract

Fujitsu has been conducting ongoing research and development in robotics to enable robots to support people and make their lives safer and more comfortable. In this paper, we present our commercial service robot "enon" and its 3D vision system. The robot, with left and right arms that give five degrees of freedom (DOF) and grippers, a pan-tilt mechanism carrying six cameras, and a wheel mechanism, can operate efficiently and provides services in a variety of places such as offices and public facilities. The vision system employs a dedicated FPGA processor to accelerate the image processing functions required for autonomous navigation. Its power consumption is only 10 W, about a seventh that of a typical Pentium®4 personal computer, while the processing speed for correlation matching is roughly three times faster than such a system. This paper also introduces our stereovision ASIC, newly developed to enhance the performance of our vision system. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.