Active Object Recognition of Closely Hung Hangers with Cloth by Home Service Robot

Abstract

In Japan, the shortage of caregivers due to the aging of the population is a serious issue and the demand for care robots is increasing. Changing and wiping, which is one of the main care tasks, is still not sufficiently skilled and is often carried out by carers alone. Against this background, we are developing a dressing assistance robot system. However, the task of picking hangers from the hanger rack was a bottleneck in our dressing assistance robot system. Therefore, we developed a hanger recognition method based on active object recognition for implementation in a dressing assistance robot system and improved the recognition accuracy. In this paper, the usefulness of a recognition method using active object recognition in the hanger recognition task is evaluated through experiments and future prospects for integration into a dressing assistance system are described.