Intelligent ambience-robot cooperation - Door-closing tasks with various robots

A large amount of information involving human beings is available on the Internet; however, only little information that involves robots is available. We believe that having ambient intelligence provides helpful information for robots under ubiquitous computing technologies. The purpose of our research is to describe common environmental information in order to enable a robotic system to execute target tasks in a variety of ambient conditions. This system can correspond to various robots and various objects when we design the task information, which does not depend on the types and structures of these robots. In this paper, we focus on the door-closing task performed by robots among various other tasks and propose a robot control method that integrates the ambient intelligence. The effectiveness of the proposed system is experimentally confirmed using a refrigerator with two types of doors; a door status sensor, which we developed; a humanoid robot; and a mobile manipulator.