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

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.