Development of a multiple mobile robot system controlled by a human - Realization of object command level

Until now, we have been developing a system for multiple mobile robot operation by a single human user. In order that robots may achieve tasks in unknown environments, we must solve two problems; one is an environment recognition problem and the other is a self-positioning problem. Concerning the former issue, the two robots that equip a monocular camera on each acquire a 3-dimensional position of a point in an environment with a stereo vision method. As for the latter issue, we set landmarks on the robots by which the robots can measure their relative positions. In each phase mentioned above, the human user gives commands to the robots appropriately. Solving the above problems, we can make a virtual environment in the computer. The virtual environment displays remote site information to the user. We can thus implement object-command level sit which the user operates a simple model of an object in the virtual environment, and robots manipulate the real object as the user says. We verified effectiveness of the proposed method by experiments.