Person-following based on social navigation into the sensorized environments

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a kinematic controller for autonomous person-following based on social navigation for human-robot interaction purposes. This controller modifies the length of personal space using the human velocity in order to allow the human user senses a natural movement by mobile robot. In this way, the social behavior is incorporated into the controller, allowing a social navigation of differential drive mobile robot (DDMR) in shared environments in both cases, sensorized environments or humans users that wear an inertial movement unit (IMU) in order to track the position. The stability proof of closed-loop control system is based on Lyapunov theory. Simulations show a good performance when human user moves forwards backwards, and also through an arbitrary path.