Development of a vision system for an outdoor service robot to collect trash on streets
Yasuhiro Fuchikawa, Takeshi Nishida, Shuichi Kurogi, Takashi Kondo, Fujio Ohkawa, Toshinori SUEHIRO, Yasuhiro Watanabe, Yoshinori Kawamura, Masayuki Obata, Hidekazu Miyagawa, Yoshimitsu Kihara · 2005
The outdoor service robot which we call OSR-01 is presently under development intending for cleaning up ur-ban areas by means of collecting discarded trash such as PET bottles, cans, plastic bags and so on. We, in this pa-per, describe the architecture of OSR-01 consisting of hard-wares such as sensors, a manipulator, driving wheels, etc. for searching for and picking up trash, and softwares such as fast pattern matching for identifying various trash and distance measurement for picking up via the manipulator. After describing the vision system in detail, which is one of the most critical parts of the trash collection task, we show the result of an open experiment in which OSR-01 collects plastic PET bottles on a real shopping street in the special zone for robot research and development in Kitakyushu-city. KEY WORDS outdoor service robot, fast pattern matching, trash collec-tion task, environment beautification 1