[Design News]
A robot system being built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will help robots autonomously navigate a constantly changing environment by making three-dimensional maps that they continuously update.
MIT’s system, a project of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is built to navigate entirely on land. The system uses a low-cost camera such as the one in Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensing input device, originally built for the Xbox 360 game platform. …
The team previously tested the approach on robots that were equipped with expensive laser scanners, but have since implemented it with a Kinect-type camera in a robotic wheelchair, a portable sensor suit, and a PR2 robot developed by Willow Garage. On these devices, the system can continuously locate the robotic hardware within a 3D map of its surroundings while traveling at speeds of up to 1.5 meters per second.
The Kinect sensor’s visible-light video camera and infrared depth sensor scan the robot’s surroundings as it moves through a new, unexplored area, while the robot builds up a 3D model of the walls of a room and the objects within it. Map details can include location information about the edges of walls and objects within the walls. …
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