Andy: A Toolkit for Developing Mobile Robot Applications with a Ceiling-mounted Camera and Visual Markers

Abstract

Small mobile robots are expected to be utilized for helping daily tasks at home. We need sophisticated user interfaces for them. However, prototyping of robot applications is still difficult for software programmers without prior knowledge of robotics including many researchers in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. We developed a software toolkit called “Andy”, with which programmers can make robots move and push objects on a flat surface with one API call and receive their two-dimensional motion events by registering listeners. Design of the APIs is influenced by programming style of Graphical User Interface. Andy provides two-dimensional absolute coordinates on the surface by detecting visual markers attached to top surfaces of robots and objects from captured images of a ceiling-mounted camera. We will report the aim of the toolkit, summary of its APIs and implementation, method and results of user studies and related work.

Publication

Daisuke Sakamoto, Jun Kato, Masahiko Inami, and Takeo Igarashi.
A Toolkit for Easy Development of Mobile Robot Applications with Visual Markers and a Ceiling Camera,
22nd Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2009), Oct. 2009,