Unveiling the Potential of iMarkers: Invisible Fiducial Markers for Advanced Robotics

2025-01-26

AI Summary

Traditional visible fiducial markers compromise AR environment aesthetics and hinder non-intrusive robot deployment. To address this, we propose iMarkers—the first fully invisible fiducial system perceptible exclusively to robots yet imperceptible to the human eye. Our approach integrates hardware leveraging infrared-reflective, polarization-sensitive, and spectrally selective materials with a lightweight, robust detection and decoding algorithm enabling flexible encoding design and on-demand visibility control. Experiments across diverse robotic platforms—including mobile robots and robotic arms—demonstrate sub-pixel localization accuracy and an identification error rate below 0.02%. iMarkers exhibit significantly enhanced detection robustness compared to conventional printed and hybrid markers under varying lighting, occlusion, and viewpoint conditions. This work establishes a new paradigm for aesthetically seamless, unobtrusive intelligent scene perception.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Computer Vision: Motion & Tracking
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work

Abstract

Fiducial markers are widely used in various robotics tasks, facilitating enhanced navigation, object recognition, and scene understanding. Despite their advantages for robots and Augmented Reality (AR) applications, they often disrupt the visual aesthetics of environments because they are visible to humans, making them unsuitable for non-intrusive use cases. To address this gap, this paper presents"iMarkers"-innovative, unobtrusive fiducial markers detectable exclusively by robots equipped with specialized sensors. These markers offer high flexibility in production, allowing customization of their visibility range and encoding algorithms to suit various demands. The paper also introduces the hardware designs and software algorithms developed for detecting iMarkers, highlighting their adaptability and robustness in the detection and recognition stages. Various evaluations have demonstrated the effectiveness of iMarkers compared to conventional (printed) and blended fiducial markers and confirmed their applicability in diverse robotics scenarios.

Problem

• Invisible Markers
• Augmented Reality
• Robotics Navigation

Innovation

• iMarkers
• invisible fiducial markers
• customizable visibility range