I'll keep you in sight: Finding a good position to observe a person

Abstract

Usually, in mobile robotics the robot has to deal with tasks like interacting with a person or performing a driving task. But what happens, if the robot just has to wait and thereby still has to react on user commands? In this case, the robot has to find a good position where the user can still be observed, and the robot does not disturb the user's activities. Such a position has to fulfill different criteria: first, to guarantee the observability of the person with the robots on-board sensors and second, the robot should be able to observe the person when the person changes its position at its resting place. In this paper, a new approach is presented how to find a position, providing all these aspects, by solving an optimization problem using a particle swarm optimizer. We also present first results for that problem in the 2D and 3D case.