Estimation of Robot´s and User´s Views and Blind Regions in Occlusion Environments

Human-friendly robots will work mainly in usual living spaces for humans, such as offices, kitchens and living rooms. In these environments, there are many objects which can cause the visual occlusion. So it will often occur that the robot cannot observe some object by the occlusion while the user can observe it, or vice versa, according to their positions. In these situations, the robot is required to recognize this "invisibility," that is, to interact with the user considering the possibility that there is some object which the user can observe but the robot cannot or vice versa. In this paper, we propose a method for estimation of robot\´s and user\´s views and blind regions from images obtained by a stereo camera. Our method is one of the fundamental techniques to realize the robot which can handle the occlusion problems mentioned above. Experimental results in real occlusion environments show the effectiveness of our method.