Autonomous operation of novel elevators for robot navigation

— Although robot navigation in indoor environments has achieved great success, robots are unable to fully navigate these spaces without the ability to operate elevators, including those which the robot has not seen before. In this paper, we focus on the key challenge of autonomous interaction with an unknown elevator button panel. A number of factors, such as lack of useful 3D features, variety of elevator panel designs, variation in lighting conditions, and small size of elevator buttons, render this goal quite difficult. To address the task of detecting, localizing, and labeling the buttons, we use state-of-the-art vision algorithms along with machine learning techniques to take advantage of contextual features. To verify our approach, we collected a dataset of 150 pictures of elevator panels from more than 60 distinct elevators, and performed extensive offline testing. On this very diverse dataset, our algorithm succeeded in correctly localizing and labeling 86.2% of the buttons...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Ellen Klingbeil, Blake Carpenter, Olga Russakovsky, Andrew Y. Ng
• Keywords: Button, Elevators, ICRA 2010, Robot, Robotics