An Application of Campro-R (Mobile Robot with Camera and Projector) at home - A speculation about structuring information indoors

We are developing a new robot service using a mobile robot with a camera and a projector in anticipation of the coming symbiosis of society with robots. We constructed a (Campro-R) system by placing a camera and projector on a mobile robot. Campro-R supports a wide variety of information-projecting-services. A typical information display service is to project an image on a real object so the information is just like a real sticky note. One problem is that the robot suffers from significant dead reckoning errors which yields errors in projecting the information, i.e. there are errors in "the environment model for projection of information". Therefore, we propose here a new concept that reduces the errors in developing the environmental model for ubiquitous information display by allocating markers in the real world according to need. We discuss the trade off between the number of the visual markers and the projection error. Finally, we show the results of a preliminary experiment conducted for assessing the impact of misalignment of projected information