Embedded human-following mobile-robot with an RGB-D camera

Abstract

Embedded device recently becomes more crucial in some real-life applications, such as the entertainment, health care, and industrial application. Given the development of embedded devices, the mobile robot becomes not only cheaper, but also more highly practical to produce. However, the embedded device still has some limitation from the hardware capability, therefore the implemented method has to be robust and low computational complexity. In this research, we introduce an embedded human following mobile robot application with an RGB-D camera, which can help us detect human position based on the human geometry, compatible into the ARM-based embedded device. The Human Depth of Interest (HDOI) is proposed to cooperate with CAM-shift algorithm for the human detection and tracking. The virtual spring model with the safe region and active region is chosen to carry out the smoothing navigation and easy implementation. The performance of our approach is enhanced more accuracy than the original CAM-shift algorithm and more feasible than the stereo vision system.