I'm still watching you: Update on observing a person in a home environment

Abstract

Recently, a mobile robot was enabled to observe persons within their home in an unobtrusive way. This behavior is necessary during the long idle periods of the robot, where the robot has to stay somewhere near the user to be able to recognize new commands and tasks. Particle swarm optimization is used to find an optimal position. In this work, the ongoing progress of our approach is presented with focus on long term, real world capable improvements. Therefore, the online update of a person distribution and an elevation map are introduced. Finally, experiments show the robustness of the found optimal observation position.