Person Detection, Tracking and Following in a Differential Drive Mobile Robot

Abstract

One primary application of robotics is the application of the robots as a personal assistant. Thus this would require the robot to perceive the environment and perform actions required by the person. One such application is a person following. Other applications are following a soldier on a battlefield and a worker in a factory carrying tools. We will take the relatively simple problem of carrying luggage. To do this, we addressed three sub-problems Detection of a Human, Tracking a human, Following a Human. And the additional requirement is that it must be done in real-time and use the robot’s on-board compute capabilities. We chose hardware and were able to achieve the required outcome in both simulation and real life.