Enabling autonomous navigation in a commercial off-the-shelf toy robot for robotic gaming

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) robots are becoming ever more ubiquitous. Among the most common applications there are toy robots. In order to keep their cost down, these robots are usually equipped with the minimum set of sensors necessary for their basic functioning. Specifically, to add entertainment value, they often feature a video camera and, in most of the games developed so far, players are basically tele-operating them through a smartphone app. The present paper aims to show how to provide existing consumer-grade robots with new capabilities to transform them in more appealing gaming companions. In particular, by considering as a test bench a wheeled, non-holonomic COTS robot whose only accessible sensor is a low-resolution camera, previously unavailable localization and autonomous navigation capabilities are developed for it by exploiting dead reckoning and artificial landmark detection algorithms. These capabilities could then be exploited to create new types of games, which can be played in free-scale unknown environments and feature new forms of interaction. Implementation details of a sorting game in which the robot acts as a referee are reported.