2018 Volume 54 Issue 2 Pages 290-297
Recently increasing number of robots have been proposed for advanced patient care. In order to instruct robots that work in cluttered environments, we have introduced an intuitive interface based on a TOF laser sensor on a pan-tilt actuator. The interface enables us to control the direction of the laser spot to select an object and instruct a robot to manipulate it by dragging and dropping operation on a PC screen (“real-world click” interface). To manipulate objects everywhere in a room, the interface provides video images from a camera on the pan-tilt actuator (viewing window). However, the location of the laser spot is hard to see in the viewing window depending on the light condition or the color and the distance of objects. To cope with the problem, we propose a new interface that provides a marker shown in the viewing window at the position of the laser spot. In this paper, we propose a method to determine the location of the laser spot based on the distance to the target and camera parameters. An experiment on five subjects clearly showed the statistically significant improvement of the usability of the proposed marker.
