Development of an attendant robot that builds a map by collaborating with a human

This paper describes an efficient indoor map building method that involves a robot collaborating with a human. A robot acquires the shape of a required part of an indoor environment, searches for a suitable picture from the scene of the destination, and registers it as a picture landmark at the same time as the robot follows the human. Once a picture landmark is registered on a map, a robot finds it and can self-localize from the next navigation. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by experiments carried out on an actual mobile robot ldquoApriAttendatraderdquo, developed by Toshiba.