Evaluation of Person Tracking Methods for Human-Robot Physical Play

Abstract

We aim to develop a robotic system that can play physical games such as play tag with humans. To realize such a system, the system needs to detect and track persons around the robot who are rapidly moving. Tracking of persons behaving as such is a challenging task. As the first step for realizing the system, we investigated fluctuation of measurement when a person is rapidly moving along a complex path. We prepared two paths: a circular path and a zig-zag path. We measured fluctuation of velocity calculated from the measured human data. As a result, the fluctuation when running the circular path was smaller than that when walking the same path. The zig-zag movement gave the larger fluctuation. In total, the amount of fluctuation was not very larger than that when a person moves along a straight path.