Floor-wall boundary detection from projected ellipses for autonomous robot navigation

In order to realize autonomous robot navigation, we propose a new method for detecting the boundary between a floor and a wall by extracting an ellipse or two ellipses projected from a robot mounted projector. We note that a circular cone of light projected onto the region where the floor and the wall meet produces two intersecting ellipses in the image. We detect the two ellipses from the image and estimate the line that separates them, which we regard as the floor-wall boundary. We also summarize a method for computing the distance between the robot and the detected floor-wall boundary. We developed an autonomous robot system and tested our proposed method in a real environment. From the results, we realized autonomous robot control and confirmed the efficiency of our method.