We have been developing the Robotic Communication Terminals (RCT) as a mobility support system for elderly and disabled people, which assists their impaired elements of mobility - recognition, actuation, and information access. The RCT consists of three types of terminals: "Environment Embedded Terminal (EET)", "user-carried mobile terminal", and "user-carrying mobile terminal". The EET system robustly detects moving objects at an outdoor surveillance site all day, and presents walkers with information about their surroundings. In this paper, as a part of the EET, we propose a method for detecting moving objects based on temporal differencing using adaptive thresholding calculated from intensity changes in the past few frames. For 23 cases of video evaluation, a high detection rate was measured under the variations caused by meteorological effects. We also have developed a test bed system that provides real-time road information detected by the EET to the map-based terminal. In the case of three clients, we demonstrate that users can receive the information from the EET with a 0.152[sec] time delay.

We have been developing the Robotic Communication Terminals (RCTs), which are integrated into a mobility support system to assist elderly or disabled people who suffer from impaired mobility. The RCT system consists of three types of terminals and one server: an environment-embedded terminal, a user-carried mobile terminal, a user-carrying mobile terminal, and a barrier-free map server. The RCT is an integrated system that can be used to cope with various problems of mobility, and provide suitable support to a wide variety of users. This paper provides an in-depth description of the user-carrying mobile terminal. The system itself is a kind of intelligent wheeled vehicle. It can recognize the surrounding 3D environment through infrared sensors, sonar sensors, and a stereo vision system with three cameras, and avoid hazards semi-autonomously. It also can provide adequate navigation by communicating with the geographic information system (GIS) server and detect vehicles appearing from the blind side by communicating with environment-embedded terminals in the real-world.

The construction method of environment description using stereo camera is described in this paper. This method is for safety of user-carried semi-autonomous mobile robot in outdoor environment that contains steps and slopes. This method constructs environment map by using three-dimension occupancy grid. These grids are cuboids fine in height direction. Three-dimension flow is used for self-localization. The elevation map is constructed from the three-dimension occupancy grid, and the dangerous area is calculated from the elevation map. This make it enable to distinguish passable slopes and impassable steps. Moreover, this system is equipped for an outdoor semi-autonomous electric scooter and performed in real world.

In this paper, we propose an environmental description for robots to memorize temporality and spatiality of wide-range environment. The description is region-based and the environment is described as a mosaic of regions. The description consists of three components: panoramic labelled image that is a segmented color panoramic image, region database that has spatial and temporal information about each region, and regions relation network that describes adjacency state between regions. The description is constantly updated in the background of other visual processing. The description enables robots to detect changes in the environment, to grasp their characteristics, and to memorize them. Moreover, we implement the environmental description on the humanoid robot Saika and show how it expands the robot's behavior.