Textual message read by a mobile robot

Giving the ability to read characters and symbols is highly desirable for increased autonomy of mobile robots operating in the real world. The idea is fairly simple: give a robot the ability to acquire an image of a message to read, extract the symbols and recognize them. Image character recognition research has been going on for decades now, with good results. But compared to conventional character recognition systems, the challenge with a mobile robot is to find a textual message to capture in the world and to get a good view of the message, knowing that the viewpoint of the robot depends on its position in relation to the message, which cannot be pre-specified. In this paper we present our approach making it possible for an autonomous mobile robot to read messages. We outline the constraints under which the approach works, and present results obtained using a Pioneer 2 robot equipped with a Pentium 233 MHz and a pan-tilt-zoom camera.