Service Robot Navigation and Computer Vision Application in a Banquet Hall Setting

This paper describes a low computation system for a surveying service robot in a banquet hall setting. Automating this process will allow staff to focus on other tasks which will improve the overall efficiency of the event setup. The robot platform used was FURO, a two-wheeled service robot with an on board computer as well as a camera. Image processing algorithms were developed using the open source Open CV library to detect a total item count and ellipse tracker program. Potential fields was the navigation algorithm implemented to generate a collision free path towards the edge of the table. The results were successful as the computer vision algorithms worked 90% of the time in a controlled environment with a normal setup. It experienced failure when items were overlapping or too close to each other. Differences in lighting also came into effect when detecting the contents on the table. Nonetheless, this experiment presents a service robot application for table monitoring in a ballroom.