A Self-Position Recognition Method for Mobile Robots Based on Robot Calling by a User Using a Cellular Phone

A service robot system consisting of a cellular phone available to common users and mobile robots has been investigated and developed for the purpose of supporting such human activities as the delivering documents and goods, guiding visitors and patrolling an indoor environment. The system has the feature that is spontaneously able to recognize the robot location on it using the notion of Map-matching, by complying with the request called by a user with a cellular phone. This is possible because the robot's location can be corrected with a barcode of simple structure which is detected by a slit-ray sensor on the robot and a QR-code including location information to be read by a cellular phone. These codes also have the features that are simple to install them in the environment and easy to operate because users don't use an exclusive controller like keyboard on computers, but their own accustomed cellular phone for calling the robot. From the repeated experiments performed with the robot in an indoor corridor, the proposed system was successfully evaluated in the measurement accuracy for some self-positions of the robot called and the reliability for practical navigation. In addition, when the robot was called at a certain location, its behaviors to unexpected action of the user and the effect affected on it are discussed.