In the modern world, robots have become an integrated part of our society. More and more robots are used as the human companions in entertainment. However, many of them are passive robots: when you want to play with your robot, you have to go to it and switch it on. To be more interesting, a robot must be an active one: it would chase its owner and go to where the owner is. Instead of being asked to play with its owner, the robot asks the owner to play with it.
We have developed a human-following wheeled mobile robot, based on a sensory system to get the position of the target person in real-time. In the system, we have:
(1) Constructed a mobile robot platform, which is fast enough to follow a person and equipped with computer vision for navigation;
(2) Designed a vision-based person detection algorithm, which is good in simplicity, efficiency, and insensitivity to the environmental illumination condition;
(3) Developed the kinematic model and designed the control law for the humanfollowing task;
(4) Constructed an ultrasonic tracking system. The distance-measuring and the angle-measuring functions have been achieved. Moreover, other than robot pets, the tracking function can have many applications.
One potential application of the tracking robot is the transportation of goods. The tracking robot can act as a luggage carrier in the airport since it can follow you automatically. This would
save you a lot of mental and physical energy.
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