Spatial Context-Aware Person-Following for a Domestic Robot

Abstract

Yuan F, Hanheide M, Sagerer G. Spatial Context-Aware Person-Following for a Domestic Robot. In: International Workshop on Cognition for Technical Systems. 2008.Domestic robots are in the focus of research in terms of service providers in households and even as robotic companion that share the living space with humans. A major capability of mobile domestic robots that is studied is joint exploration of space. One challenge to deal with this task is how could we let the robots move in space in reasonable, socially acceptable ways so that it will support interaction and communication as a part of the joint exploration. As a step toward this challenge, we have developed a context-aware following behavior considering the social aspects and applied these together with a multi-modal person-tracking method to switch between three basic following approaches, namely direction-following, path-following and parallel-following. These are derived from the observation of human-human following schemes and are activated depending on the current spatial context (e.g. free space) and the relative position of the interacting human. A combination of the elementary behaviors is performed in real time with our mobile robot in different environments. First experimental results are provided to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed approach