Development of a Human-Robot Cooperative System Based on Visual Information

In recent years, along with the aging of society worldwide, decrease of working population has become a serious problem. For this reason, robots are expected to substitute human work, automate distribution, and support human daily life, especially, elderly care assistance. In this research, we focus on the support of those who need care in everyday life, and, in this paper, we propose a human-robot cooperative system that supports acquisition of objects in cooperation with a human. The outline of the action of this robot is as follows: (i) It moves to the location designated by a user autonomously (not by remote control): (ii) On arrival, the robot exchanges information by video with the user who is at a remote place, and acquires the objects designated by the user among those placed there. (iii) After the acquisition, the robot moves again autonomously to the user and hands over the objects to the user. In this paper, we focus on step (ii) and show methods and some experimental results.