Position Estimation of Picking Target based on Image taken from Bed

Abstract

It is distress for a patient on the bed to pick an object up that is away from the bed. A robot may solve such a problem, that is, if the position of the object is known, a robot can pick it up and deliver it to the patient. However, there are usually lots of objects in the room, and their positions are unknown. This means that the estimation of the position of the object that the patient would like to pick up is required for picking by a robot. In this research, the authors proposed a method to estimate the position of an object by taking pictures with an AR marker. This AR marker is attached to the wall, so its position is previously known; it is possible to be used as a reference position. Experiments were conducted, and the precision of the position estimation were evaluated.