Point and fetch

A team of researchers led by Charlie Kemp, director of the Center for Healthcare Robotics in the Health Systems Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, have found a way to instruct a robot to find and deliver an item it may have never seen before using a laser pointer.

El-E (pronounced Ellie), a robot designed to help users with limited mobility with everyday tasks, autonomously moves to an item selected with a green laser pointer, picks up the item and then delivers it to the user, another person or a selected location such as a table.

The robot can grasp and deliver several types of household items including towels, pill bottles and telephones from floors or tables.

The robot uses a custom-built camera that is omni-directional to see most of the room. After the robot detects that a selection has been made with the laser pointer, the robot moves two cameras to look at the laser spot and triangulate its position in three-dimensional space. Next, the robot estimates where the item is in relation to its body and travels to the location. If the location is above the floor, the robot finds the edge of the surface on which the object is sitting, such as the edge of a table.