Intelligent Mobile Stool (IMS)
Student project, MA Intelligent Systems, winter term 2009/10

Participants

Tutor

Project objectives

This project is part of the Tangible Active Objects (TAOs) research project.

Description

The task was to create a self-driving stool that can detect people in a room and offer itself for seating. A camera is installed under the ceiling for visual search and marker tracking. A table representing the room can be used to set tangible objects, which are monitored via a webcam. Such an object corresponds to an actual mobile stool in the room. The stool is controlled via a wireless connection based on coordinates calculated from the pictures of the webcam.

Results

Conclusion

The stool was built with two motors and a robust corpus. The execution of remote control was successful. Due to problems in regards to tracking the stool via marker-tracking software, it can only be driven remotely. The Pioneer platform is running smoothly. Control via tangible objects works well and the placement of objects on the control-table results in the stool navigating towards appropriate positions in real room coordinates. The table for tangible objects was created and uses a webcam to track the movement of the objects, which correspond to the mobile platforms. Software components, such as the potentialplanner, are implemented and functioning.

Images

IMSNavigator - prototype software used to define goals for mobile objects:

The built hardware:

video