Development of a vision-based interface for instructing robot motion

This paper describes a vision-based interface for instructing robot motion easily. An interface that makes the robot move in the same way as user's motion is effective for an intuitive motion instruction. Such an interface can be realized by estimating the pose (position and orientation) of the interface and executing move commands for making the robot take the same pose.We estimate the pose of the interface by a monocular SLAM method, which is based on visual features and the extended Kalman filter. By additionally using an orientation sensor and an accelerometer, the reliability and the accuracy of pose estimation are improved. From the estimated pose, the target values of the robot position and the head orientation are set and the robot moves to achieve them. We implemented an experimental system which run in real-time (30 [Hz]) and successfully applied it to controlling a humanoid robot.