Humans as Path-Finders for Safe Navigation
This addresses the barrier to widespread use of mobile robots in unstructured environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing tracking and sensor fusion methods.
The paper tackles the problem of safe path planning for mobile robots in human-populated environments by having a human operator walk in front to mark the path with footsteps, and it reports extensive experimental validation of the approach.
One of the most important barriers toward a widespread use of mobile robots in unstructured and human populated work environments is the ability to plan a safe path. In this paper, we propose to delegate this activity to a human operator that walks in front of the robot marking with her/his footsteps the path to be followed. The implementation of this approach requires a high degree of robustness in locating the specific person to be followed (the leader). We propose a three phase approach to fulfil this goal: 1. identification and tracking of the person in the image space, 2. sensor fusion between camera data and laser sensors, 3. point interpolation with continuous curvature curves. The approach is described in the paper and extensively validated with experimental results.