Human-robot collaborative remote object search

Abstract

Object search is one of the typical tasks for remotely controlled service robots. Although object recognition technologies have been well developed, an efficient search strategy (or viewpoint planning method) is still an issue. This paper describes a new approach to human-robot collaborative remote object search. An analogy for our approach is ride on shoulders; a user controls a fish-eye camera on a remote robot to change views and search for a target object, independently of the robot. Combined with a certain level of automatic search capability of the robot, this collaboration can realize an efficient target object search. We developed an experimental system to show the feasibility of the approach.