A computationally low cost vision based tracking algorithm for human following robot

Abstract

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the field of human interactive robotics. Contrary to otherwise complex and resource hungry algorithms, we in this work have presented a computationally low cost algorithm for a human following robotic application. Instead of detecting the human, the algorithm makes use of a specific colour tag placed on the human subject which is detected by a camera mounted on the robot. Sensors including range sensor, magnetometer and optical encoders are utilized in tandem to assist the human following process. The method is tested on a custom built robotic platform running Raspberry pi minicomputer. We have performed and presented the results of several experiments for the evaluation of our method.