Laser-Based Door Localization for Autonomous Mobile Service Robots

Abstract

For autonomous mobile service robots, closed doors that are in their way are restricting obstacles. In order to open doors with on-board manipulation skills, a robot needs to be able to localize the door’s key features, such as the hinge and handle, as well as the current opening angle. While there are vision-based approaches for detecting doors and handles in images, we concentrate on analyzing 2D laser range scans. This requires less computational effort, and laser-scan sensors are available on most mobile robot platforms. Therefore, we developed three different machine learning approaches and a heuristic method based on line fitting able to extract the required position data. The algorithms are compared with respect to localization accuracy with help of a dataset containing laser range scans of doors. Our LaserDoors dataset is publicly available for academic use. Pros and cons of the individual methods are discussed; basically, the machine learning methods could outperform the heuristic method, but require special training data when applied in a real application.