Intelligent Space for Human Centered Robotics

Robot systems for supporting human life are desired recently. For that purpose, the robots need to recognize a human living environment that changes dynamically. However, it is difficult to achieve it only with the sensors carried in a stand-alone robot. Then, the research field on the intelligent environments based on the sensor network has been expanding [Sato], [MacDorman]. The intelligent environments generally utilize many intelligent devices, such as computers and sensors in order to improve the performance of the robots. We proposed the intelligent space (iSpace) [Lee, (2002)] as the human-robot coexistent system. The Intelligent Space is designed to achieve a human-centred service by accelerating the physical and psychological interaction between human beings and robots. The iSpace exploits intelligent devices with processing and networking parts in addition to sensing images from colour CCD cameras. The iSpace with vision based intelligent devices achieves a contact-free wide-area location system without an additional burden to users. Vision based iSpace also has the possibility that the further information can be obtained depending