A navigation method of service robots at shelters

Great East Japan Earthquake occurred at March 11 2011 and following Tsunami and the Fukushima 1 nuclear disaster have forced many people to evacuate from their habitations to other places. These have thrown down many challenges to service robots. According to a report from Japanese government, about 120,000 people live at evacuated places and 40,000 among them live in temporary shelters, such as schools or community centers at June 2. Moving around shelters is one of challenges that robots do services to people. It is difficult to prepare a complete map of shelters and to operate robots autonomously at shelters where conditions dynamically change, and also it is hard to move robots by remote operation because manpower is needed for other tasks. In this paper, the experiments of robot operation by elderly and of the proposed indication method are introduced. We propose a method of indication to robot and AR marks and QRcode and discuss the merits of the marks that can be both human and robot readable marks.