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

Fiducial markers are widely used in robotics to support navigation, object recognition, and scene understanding. Despite their advantages in robotics and augmented reality (AR), their visibility can disrupt environmental esthetics, limiting their use in everyday settings. To address this gap, this article presents “iMarkers,” innovative and unobtrusive fiducial markers detectable exclusively by robots and AR devices equipped with adequate sensors and detection algorithms. These markers offer high flexibility in production, allowing customization of their visibility range and encoding algorithms to suit various demands. The article also introduces the hardware designs and open source 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 with conventional (printed) and blended fiducial markers and have confirmed their applicability across diverse robotics scenarios.