Mobile Robot Control for Human Following in Intelligent Space

Abstract

In the environment that human and robots coexist, mobile robots have to approach human as much as possible in order to provide human with physical services. For friendly interaction with human, the robots should be able to afford human-affinitive movement. In this paper, human following, as one of human-affinitive movements, of robot is achieved. The human following robot requires several techniques; the recognition of the target human, the recognition of the environment around the robot, and the control strategy for stable human following. In this research, Intelligent Space, where many sensors and intelligent devices are distributed, is used for the recognition of the target human and the environment around the robot. The control law based on the virtual spring model is proposed to mitigate the difference of movement between the human and the mobile robot. The proposed control law is applied to Intelligent Space and its performance is verified by computer simulation and experiment.