A compressed infrared motion sensing system for human-following robots

Abstract

This paper develops a compressed infrared motion sensing system for mobile robots to detect and localize a moving human target in the vicinity. The proposed sensing system consists of three compressed infrared bearing sensor arrays for generating the bearing measurements of a human target from three perspectives. Then, human location is inferred by fusing these bearing measurements with least square method. The bearing sensor array is composed of pyroelectric infrared (PIR) sensors, and we employ the compressed sensing paradigm for the bearing sensor array design for reducing the number of required PIR sensors. A sensing system prototype is developed and evaluated in the context of human-following with mobile robots.