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Person-Following Algorithm Based on Laser Range Finder and Monocular Camera Data Fusion for a Wheeled Autonomous Mobile Robot

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Interactive Collaborative Robotics (ICR 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12336))

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Abstract

Reliable human following is one of the key capabilities of service and personal assisting robots. This paper presents a novel person tracking and following approach for autonomous mobile robots that are equipped with a 2D laser rangefinder (LRF) and a monocular camera. The proposed method does not impose restrictions on a person’s clothes, does not require a head or an upper body to be within a camera field of view and is suitable for low height indoor robots as well. The algorithm is based on a metric that takes into an account parameters obtained directly from LRF and monocular camera data. The algorithm was implemented and tested in the Gazebo simulator. Next, it was integrated into a control system of the TIAGo Base mobile robot and successfully validated in university environment experiments with real people. In addition, this paper proposes a new criterion of algorithm performance estimation, which is a function of false positives number and traveled distances by a person and by a robot. Further this criterion is used to compare performance of the proposed method with the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) tracker in simulated and in real world environments.

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Acknowledgements

The reported study was funded by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR) according to the research project No. 19–58-70002. Special thanks to PAL Robotics for their kind professional support with TIAGo Base robot software and hardware related issues.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Intelligent Robotic Systems (LIRS), Intelligent Robotics Department, Higher Institute for Information Technology and Intelligent Systems, Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russian Federation

    Elvira Chebotareva, Ramil Safin & Evgeni Magid

  2. Department of Electrical Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Douliu, Taiwan

    Kuo-Hsien Hsia

  3. Institute of Innovation for Future Society, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan

    Alexander Carballo

Authors
  1. Elvira Chebotareva
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  2. Ramil Safin
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  3. Kuo-Hsien Hsia
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  4. Alexander Carballo
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  5. Evgeni Magid
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elvira Chebotareva .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Andrey Ronzhin

  2. Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Gerhard Rigoll

  3. Institute of Control Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

    Roman Meshcheryakov

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Chebotareva, E., Safin, R., Hsia, KH., Carballo, A., Magid, E. (2020). Person-Following Algorithm Based on Laser Range Finder and Monocular Camera Data Fusion for a Wheeled Autonomous Mobile Robot. In: Ronzhin, A., Rigoll, G., Meshcheryakov, R. (eds) Interactive Collaborative Robotics. ICR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12336. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60337-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60337-3_3

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