Finding Tables for Home Service Tasks and Safe Mobile Robot Navigation

A persistent difficulty of indoor robot navigation is to reliably locate tables for navigation or service tasks. The predominately used laser range finders have difficulties to detect thin metallic table legs and protruding table surfaces. This papers presents a simple yet robust approach to locate table surfaces using stereo vision in home and office environments. Disparity image data is used to first locate the ground plane with an approach building on the results in [3]. Exploiting the expectation of the floor plane, parallel surfaces are detected. Robustness is achieved by using a combination of local grouping processes and probabilistic estimation to cope with the noisy disparity data and to cope with the typically large number of spurious data points. Tables are detected and located independently of clutter on the table or the type of legs. Experiments in a home environment show detection accuracy of less than two centimeters in estimating the table or chair surface height.