Multisensor-based human detection and tracking for mobile service robots

The one of fundamental issues for service robots is human-robot interaction. In order to perform such a task and provide the desired services, these robots need to detect and track people in the surroundings. In the present paper, we propose a solution for human tracking with a mobile robot that implements multisensor data fusion techniques. The system utilizes a new algorithm for laser-based legs detection using the on-board LRF. The approach is based on the recognition of typical leg patterns extracted from laser scans, which are shown to be very discriminative also in cluttered environments. These patterns can be used to localize both static and walking persons, even when the robot moves. Furthermore, faces are detected using the robot's camera and the information is fused to the legs position using a sequential implementation of Unscented Kalman Filter. The proposed solution is feasible for service robots with a similar device configuration and has been successfully implemented on two different mobile platforms. Several experiments illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing that robust human tracking can be performed within complex indoor environments

A bank of unscented Kalman filters for multimodal human perception with mobile service robots

A new generation of mobile service robots could be ready soon to operate in human environments if they can robustly estimate position and identity of surrounding people. Researchers in this field face a number of challenging problems, among which sensor uncertainties and real-time constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient solution for simultaneous tracking and recognition of people within the observation range of a mobile robot. Multisensor techniques for legs and face detection are fused in a robust probabilistic framework to height, clothes and face recognition algorithms. The system is based on an efficient bank of Unscented Kalman Filters that keeps a multi-hypothesis estimate of the person being tracked, including the case where the latter is unknown to the robot. Several experiments with real mobile robots are presented to validate the proposed approach. They show that our solutions can improve the robot's perception and recognition of humans, providing a useful contribution for the future application of service robotics

Towards robots reasoning about group behavior of museum visitors: leader detection and group tracking

The final publication is available at IOS Press through http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/AIS-170467Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Enabling Depth-driven Visual Attention on the iCub Humanoid Robot: Instructions for Use and New Perspectives

The importance of depth perception in the interactions that humans have within their nearby space is a well established fact. Consequently, it is also well known that the possibility of exploiting good stereo information would ease and, in many cases, enable, a large variety of attentional and interactive behaviors on humanoid robotic platforms. However, the difficulty of computing real-time and robust binocular disparity maps from moving stereo cameras often prevents from relying on this kind of cue to visually guide robots' attention and actions in real-world scenarios. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: first, we show that the Efficient Large-scale Stereo Matching algorithm (ELAS) by A. Geiger et al. 2010 for computation of the disparity map is well suited to be used on a humanoid robotic platform as the iCub robot; second, we show how, provided with a fast and reliable stereo system, implementing relatively challenging visual behaviors in natural settings can require much less effort. As a case of study we consider the common situation where the robot is asked to focus the attention on one object close in the scene, showing how a simple but effective disparity-based segmentation solves the problem in this case. Indeed this example paves the way to a variety of other similar applications