A signage service robot FURO moving in a designated area of a hall by scene based virtual fence

Abstract

This paper presents a method for scene-based nav-igation in a designated area of hall using a virtualfence with line landmarks. The navigation processuses feature-based appearance model without us-ing any 3D information, and accurate localizationprocesses. The proposed virtual fence consists ofscenes from the surroundings, and generates forceto pull the robot into the designated area. A robotapproaching the boundaries of a virtual fence, ex-periences a strong force. The force is proportionalto a similarity between the scene acquired by thecamera and scenes from a virtual fence database.We apply our approach to commercialized mobilerobots (FURO). We tested the proposed hall navi-gation method in realistic environments for variousevaluations, and we report the results.