Estimating the movement path of people in the whole environment by integrating local observations using multiple robots

Abstract

Autonomous mobile robots are required to operate in a wider area of environments. When having a security robot monitor people in the environment, we thought that the robot could be operated more efficiently if it could understand the movement paths of people in the environment. In this paper, we propose a new method for obtaining movement paths information over a wide area. The presence/absence of people in the observable area, the walking speed, and the elapsed time outside the observable area are integrated to estimate the movement paths of people. We can obtain global information of movement paths from local observation information. Through experiments with security robots, we show that it is possible to improve the quality of security by obtaining trends related to human movement in the environment from estimated path information and using these trends in the robot’s patrolling strategy.