Abstract:
In recent years, robots that recognize people
around them and provide guidance, information, and
monitoring have been attracting attention. The mainstream of
conventional human recognition technology is the method using
a camera or laser range finder. However, it is difficult to
recognize with a camera due to fluctuations in lighting 1), and it
is often affected by the recognition environment such as
misrecognition 2) with a person's leg and a chair's leg with a
laser range finder. Therefore, we propose a human recognition
method using a thermal camera that can visualize human heat.
This study aims to realize human-following autonomous
movement based on human recognition. In addition, the
distance from the robot to the person is measured with a stereo
thermal camera that uses two thermal cameras. A coaxial twowheeled
robot that is compact and capable of super-credit
turning is used as a mobile robot. Finally, we conduct an
autonomous movement experiment of a coaxial mobile robot
based on human recognition by combining these. We performed
human-following experiments on a coaxial two-wheeled robot
based on human recognition using a stereo thermal camera and
confirmed that it moves appropriately to the location where the
recognized person is in multiple use cases (scenarios). However,
the accuracy of distance measurement by stereo vision is inferior
to that of laser measurement. It is necessary to improve it in the
case of movement that requires more accuracy.
