A point-and-click interface for the real world: Laser designation of objects for mobile manipulation

We present a novel interface for human-robot interaction that enables a human to intuitively and unambiguously select a 3D location in the world and communicate it to a mobile robot. The human points at a location of interest and illuminates it (“clicks it”) with an unaltered, off-the-shelf, green laser pointer. The robot detects the resulting laser spot with an omnidirectional, catadioptric camera with a narrow-band green filter. After detection, the robot moves its stereo pan/tilt camera to look at this location and estimates the location´s 3D position with respect to the robot´s frame of reference. Unlike previous approaches, this interface for gesture-based pointing requires no instrumentation of the environment, makes use of a non-instrumented everyday pointing device, has low spatial error out to 3 meters, is fully mobile, and is robust enough for use in real-world applications. We demonstrate that this human-robot interface enables a person to designate a wide variety of everyday objects placed throughout a room. In 99.4% of these tests, the robot successfully looked at the designated object and estimated its 3D position with low average error. We also show that this interface can support object acquisition by a mobile manipulator. For this application, the user selects an object to be picked up from the floor by “clicking” on it with the laser pointer interface. In 90% of these trials, the robot successfully moved to the designated object and picked it up off of the floor.