Abstract
In this paper, we investigate a mobile robot navigation system which can localize the mobile robot correctly and navigate based on observation of human walking in order to operate in a space populated by humans with minimal disturbance to them. To realize this system, we utilize multiple intelligent devices embedded in the environment. The human walking paths are obtained from a distributed vision system. We extract important points from observation and build a topological map of nodes which are important points and of edges which are added based on the presence of paths between important points. In addition, the human walking paths between two important points are averaged to get frequently used paths. The averaged paths are utilized as paths of the mobile robots. The mobile robot navigation based on observation of human is also performed with the support of the system. The position and orientation of the mobile robot are estimated from wheel encoder and distributed vision system measurement data using an extended Kalman filter. The system navigates the mobile robot along the frequently used paths by tracking control.
