Position Control of Mobile Robot for Human-Following in Intelligent Space with Distributed Sensors

Latest advances in hardware technology and state of the art of mobile robot and artificial intelligence research can be employed to develop autonomous and distributed monitoring systems. And mobile service robot requires the perception of its present position to coexist with humans and support humans effectively in populated environments. To realize these abilities, robot needs to keep track of relevant changes in the environment. This paper proposes a localization of mobile robot using the images by distributed intelligent networked devices (DINDs) in intelligent space (ISpace) is used in order to achieve these goals. This scheme combines data from the observed position using dead-reckoning sensors and the estimated position using images of moving object, such as those of a walking human, used to determine the moving location of a mobile robot. The moving object is assumed to be a pointobject and projected onto an image plane to form a geometrical constraint equation that provides position data of the object based on the kinematics of the intelligent space. Using the a priori known path of a moving object and a perspective camera model, the geometric constraint equations that represent the relation between image frame coordinates of a moving object and the estimated position of the robot are derived. The proposed method utilizes the error between the observed and estimated image coordinates to localize the mobile robot, and the Kalman filtering scheme is used to estimate the location of moving robot. The proposed approach is applied for a mobile robot in ISpace to show the reduction of uncertainty in the determining of the location of the mobile robot. Its performance is verified by computer simulation and experiment.