Human observation based mobile robot navigation in intelligent space

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 the human shared space with minimal disturbance to humans. To realize this system, we utilize many intelligent devices embedded in the environment. The human walking paths are obtained from distributed vision systems and frequently used paths in the environment are extracted. 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 3D ultrasonic positioning system measurement data using extended Kalman filter. The system navigates the mobile robot along the frequently used paths by tracking control.