Design and Implementation of a Human-Acceptable Accompanying Behaviour for a Service Robot

Robots have been already occupying the industry sector since the 70’s. Nowadays, robots are begining to be introduced effectively into the service sector as well. Robotic pets, vacuum cleaners, nurses, tour guides have already been making their small place in the service sector. When service robots are meant to share their working space activelly with humans, the capability of dealing with the social constraints of movement are valuable. A service robot that is meant to follow a person in order to perform its service would benefit from this consideration. The master thesis work presented in this paper was intended to design and implement an accompanying behaviour that could cope with the mentioned social constraints in a service robot. The problem is first delineated, and some related work done in the field is presented. After that, the problem definition is shown to justify the designed architecture, and the whole architecture is depicted. The implementation details of this architecture are later explained. Finally, the overall performance of the implemented design is studied, and conclusions and future improvement are posed.