Abstract
Recently, robots are getting popular not only in factory environments but also in human daily life environments. Practical mobile robots becomes gradually popular, for example, rumba from iRobot, as a vacuum cleaner robot. More practical robots interacting with a general user are going to be popular in near future.
In human robot interaction, intuitive interface is necessary. Instruction by gesture is one of the intuitive interfaces and a potential user does not need any training for showing a gesture.
On the other hand, localization and navigation with an upward directed camera on a mobile robot has been studied, so far. The mobile robot watches ceiling above and localizes by itself. We have investigated the self-localization system with the ceiling vision and proposed a simple human pointing recognition system for a mobile robot with an upward directed camera. We have a demonstration of the self-localization and the navigation with the human pointing recognition system.
