The advances of technologies for mobile robotics enable the application of robots to increasingly complex tasks. Cleaning office buildings on a daily basis is a problem that could be partially automatized with a cleaning robot that assists the cleaning professional yielding a higher cleaning capacity. A typical task in this domain is the selective cleaning, that is a focused cleaning effort to dirty spots, which speeds up the overall cleaning procedure significantly. To enable a robotic cleaner to accomplish this task, it is first necessary to distinguish dirty areas from the clean remainder. This paper discusses a vision-based dirt detection system for mobile cleaning robots that can be applied to any surface and dirt without previous training, that is fast enough to be executed on a mobile robot and which achieves high dirt recognition rates of 90% at an acceptable false positive rate of 45%. The paper also introduces a large database of real scenes which was used for the evaluation and is publicly available
This paper investigates the suitability of visualizing global 3D environment maps generated from RGB-D sensor data in teleoperation user interfaces for service robots. We carried out a controlled experiment involving 27 participants, four teleoperation tasks, and two types of novel global 3D mapping techniques. Results show substantial advantages of global 3D mapping over a control condition for three of the four tasks. Global 3D mapping in the user interface lead to reduced search times for objects and to fewer collisions. In most situations it also resulted in less operator workload, higher situation awareness, and higher accuracy of operators' mental models of the remote environment.
In this paper we present the latest step in the evolution of the Care-O-bot: From a technical machine via an acceptable embodiment to an attractive robot with an emotional attitude as a Gentleman. We argue that technology, design and user experience have to match to create a robot that will blend not only visually but also emotionally into the scenarios it will be used for. The Care-O-bot 4 is engineered and designed as a general purpose robot that not only provides a large set of functional capabilities but also evokes positive emotions and thus furthering and enhancing human-robot interaction (HRI)
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