Interactive collision avoidance system for indoor mobile robots based on human-robot interaction

Abstract

This paper presents a collision avoidance system based on human-robot interaction for mobile robots, which are working alongside to humans. In the future work environments, mobile robots will work side by side to humans. This raises big challenges related to the safety of the human and the ability of the robot to identify the people, interact with them and avoid physical accidents to them. To realize these concepts, a human-robot interaction system together with a collision avoidance system are developed to enable a safe navigation of the mobile robots. In this system, when a robot meets people in its path, it will try to interact with the human to execute one of the three actions: move forward, move backward, and collision avoidance; or the robot will implement the collision-avoidance autonomously when no people interacted with it. The interaction is based on the gestures obtained from the Kinect 2.0 sensor, and the system was tested using a H20 Robot (Canada). The experimental results proved the validity of the proposed system in interacting with the humans, and avoiding them.