A multipurpose autonomous robot for target recognition in unknown environments

In recent years, the technological improvements of consumer robots, in terms of processing capacity and sensors, are enabling an ever-increasing number of researchers to quickly develop both scale prototypes and alternative low cost solutions. In these contexts, a critical aspect is the design of ad-hoc algorithms according to the features of the available hardware. This paper proposes a prototype of an autonomous robot for mapping unknown environments and recognizing target objects. During the setup phase one or more target objects are shown to the RGB camera of the robot which, for each of them, extracts and stores a set of A-KAZE features. Afterwards, the robot adopts the ultrasonic distance measurement and the RGB stream to map the whole environment and search a set of A-KAZE features matchable with those previously acquired. The paper also reports both preliminary tests carried out on a reference indoor environment and a case study performed in an outdoor one that validate the proposed system.