So anyways turns out Softbank Robotics is part of a much larger company, but they integrate (sell/install) several robots. I didn’t see any on my visit but I’d wager it was a cleaning robot or a food delivery robot.
Anyways, anyone else starting to see AprilTags or similar outside of academics/FIRST/industrial use? I use them at work as well but that’s mobile robotics. Obviously id expect that connection. This was just completely random.
Edit: it was about 18 inches above the carpet, mounted behind plexiglass to the wall. The Tag image is pretty small (2 inch by 2 inch) so the robot must have a good camera or be close. They were only at hallway junctions, but not at every apartment door.
My family didn’t notice it. I stopped suddenly in the middle of the hallway to bend over to a random wall, pull out my phone and snap a pic. They must’ve thought I was insane.
On the way to our first FTC qualifier this fall, we stopped at a Circle K, and I decided to grab breakfast. After scanning all of my items, I set them on the counter and my total for two sandwiches and a drink was like $32. The woman behind the counter politely informed me that the “counter” was actually a scanner that you could just place your items on and it would automatically scan them all, meaning that I had accidentally scanned about 17 sandwiches. After fixing my mistakes for me, we left, and it wasn’t until we arrived at the event and I went to throw away the wrapper that I realized that every breakfast sandwich has a little April tag on it, which must be how the scan system works.
I was so geeked to find them in the wild for a non robotics application!
Another fun one for in store localization is Target (not Apriltags). They put BLE beacons in the ceiling lights and the Target app will localize off that.
That seems rather elegant honestly and will better protect people’s privacy.
My biggest issue with visual based Odometry (in commercial robotics) is the need for cameras and as a random pedestrian no way of knowing if your face and personal data is being logged and tracked by the system as well. That bugs me somewhat. I.e. if the cart cameras track your face and use it to log semi-anonymous data based on your probable Race, Gender and Age what products you look at, what areas of the store you visit when, and why. That’s valuable data that these companies will farm and sell (they already do this with your customer club and rewards data) and this is a way to do it and they aren’t asking for consent or warning you if they are doing it. At least a warning sign in the building saying “Visual Based tracking system in use, smile you may be on camera and tracked” would at least be a half effort.
