Relative-Posture-Fixed Model Predictive Human-Following Control with Visibility Constraints in Obstacle Environments

摘要

The relative-posture-fixed human following is critical for the human-robot interaction and cooperation in daily scenes such as domestic service and healthcare. However, few of previous researches have discussed the difficulties faced by mobile robots in the real world, including the limitation of sensing range and hindrance from obstacles. For practicality, in this paper we investigate the relative-posture-fixed following control with collision avoidance and visibility constraints. The control task is formulated as a receding-horizon optimization problem and solved under the Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework, while an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) based human trajectory predict algorithm is integrated into the robot controller. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified in a simulation, and the results demonstrate a promising performance of our controller for the human-following task in complicated environments.