PRE2017 3 Groep15

SotA: literature study

Development of Outdoor Service Robot to Collect Trash on Streets

This paper describes the design of an autonomous robot which is to be used to collect trash on the streets. The robot has two wheels to move but drives an already provided route. To avoid objects it uses four 2-D laser range finders. It is currently only able to pickup PET bottles using a hand with five degrees of freedom. It can detect objects using a omni-camera. To measure the distance to the object, it uses two additional cameras. The image recognition is done using a technique known as 'template matching'. This means that the robot has a large library of objects labelled as trash which it compares to the images received from the omni-camera. If the images are sufficiently similar, the robot will pick it up.

Obata, M., Nishida, T., Miyagawa, H., Kondo, T., & Ohkawa, F. (2006). Development of Outdoor Service Robot to Collect Trash on Streets. IEEJ Transactions on Electronics, Information and Systems, 126(7), 840-848. doi:10.1541/ieejeiss.126.840

Vision-Based Coverage Navigation for Robot Trash Collection Task

This paper describes an algorithm to optimally find and pickup trash and benchmarks this against existing algorithms. The proposed algorithm consists of four distinct steps

1. Follow the wall to obtain the contour and size of the working space. By doing this the working space can be split up into rectangular cells.

2. Scan for garbage in the current cell

3. Find and move to an unvisited area. Repeat step 2 and 3 until all areas have been visited.

4. Deposit trash and move back to initial location

Step 3 is implemented using the 'Boustrophedon Path-Planner' algorithm and a random path planner. It turned out that the 'Boustrophedon Path-Planner' performed better.