Intelligent robotics: The ultimate automatic door system

Assistant Professor, Department of Human Media Systems at Graduate School of Information Systems, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo.

Tetsuo Tomizawa is an assistant professor at the Department of Human Media Systems at Graduate School of Information Systems, University of Electro-Communications (UEC). "I spent my graduate school days developing 'town-robotic systems' that fit seamlessly into the real word to support humans in their daily lives," says Tomizawa. "Examples include a remote book browsing system to enable people to control a robot in a library to select a book and then transmit images of the contents via a camera. The robot turns the pages as instructed. A virtual version of a genuine library in the comfort of your own home."

Recently, Tomizawa has directed his attention to the development of intelligent automatic door systems. "I am reapplying laser scanning technology from my research on town robots," says Tomizawa. The major goals are to develop automatic doors that open only for people who intend to use them and adjust the precise timing of the doors to open to match the speed of people moving towards the doors. Rather like the rapid and precise movement of sliding doors in the Star Trek movies.

The automatic door system consists of an innovative three-dimensional laser range sensor that makes Lissajous figure scans in real time near the doors (measurement range at a height of 3.5 m is 5.0 m by 3.0 m; observation of 5440 points/frame at frame rate of 10 Hz) and algorithms to control the opening times of the doors. Examples of the 'intelligence' of the system include robustness to changes in the sunlight and rain, and visual recognition of people who are just passing by with no intension of using the doors.

Another innovation is using the 3D laser scanner to count people using the automatic doors. "The challenge in people counting is to identify individuals who are walking in close proximity to each other," says Tomizawa. Notably, the UEC automatic door system has achieved 99% accuracy in counting 500 people over a period of 90 minutes. "We are working with industrial partners to commercialise these ideas," says Tomizawa. "We envisage many other applications of our Star Trek door system."

Publications

1. Daiki Nishida et al, Development of Intelligent Automatic Door System, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA 2014), pp 6368-6374, May 31 - June 7, 2014. Hong Kong.

Further information

1. Tetsuo Tomizawa website: http://www.tomy3.com/Research/