Discovery, localization and recognition of smart objects by a mobile robot

This paper presents a robotic system that exploits Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) technologies for implementing an ambient intelligence scenario. We address the problems of robot object discovery, localization, and recognition in a fully distributed way. We propose to embed some memory, some computational power, and some communication capability in the objects, by attaching a WSN mote to each object. We called the union of an object and of a mote, a smart object. The robot does not have any information on the number nor on the kind of objects in the environment. The robot discovers the objects through the radio frequency communication provided by the WSN motes. The robot roughly locates the motes by performing a range-only SLAM algorithm based on the RSSI-range measurements. A more precise localization and recognition step is performed by processing images acquired by the camera installed on the robot and matching the descriptors extracted from these images with those transmitted by the motes. Experiments with eight smart objects in a cluttered office environment with many dummy objects are reported. The robot was able to correctly locate the motes, to navigate toward them and to correctly recognize the smart objects. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.