Abstract
This paper describes a novel personal robot to support active human life by assisting transportation. The proposed robot is able to follow a person with bringing the luggage. Therefore, the robot encourages the elder people to go to outside for shopping, visiting friends and so on. In order to realize these requested specifications, the robot has to achieve both small footprint for coexistence with people and high traveling performance to follow a person. In this paper, the method for tracking and following a person are proposed to realize robust person following at speed as ordinary walkers. The proposed tracking method based on extended Kalman filter is able to track peoples around the personal robot using the data from laser range finder and the robot velocity as inputs. The following controller is based on direct following. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified through the experiment using the new prototype robot.
