Janitor Bot - Detecting Light Switches

The demand for janitorial robots has gone up with the rising affluence and increasingly busy lifestyles of people [1], both in offices and personal homes. All too often people forget to switch off lights, close doors, throw away garbage and so on; this is where a janitorial robot would come in handy. This kind of robot must have the necessary characteristics of being able to autonomously navigate through its surroundings, and also detect and recognize objects of interest for its assigned tasks. In this project, we focus on the latter problem for the specific case of turning off lights. The robot needs to know where the light switch is in order to turn the lights off, so the visual system must be able to precisely detect the 2D location of the light switch on the wall.