Person-following of a Mobile Robot using a Complementary Tracker with a Camera-laser Scanner

摘要

This paper proposes a method of tracking an object for a person-following mobile robot by combining a monocular camera and a laser scanner, where each sensor can supplement the weaknesses of the other sensor. For human-robot interaction, a mobile robot needs to maintain a distance between a moving person and itself. Maintaining distance consists of two parts: object tracking and person-following. Object tracking consists of particle filtering and online learning using shape features which are extracted from an image. A monocular camera easily fails to track a person due to a narrow field-of-view and influence of illumination changes, and has therefore been used together with a laser scanner. After constructing the geometric relation between the differently oriented sensors, the proposed method demonstrates its robustness in tracking and following a person with a success rate of 94.7% in indoor environments with varying lighting conditions and even when a moving object is located between the robot and the person.