Contribution to vision-based localization, tracking and navigation methods for an interactive mobile service-robot

Presents vision-based robot navigation and user localization techniques of our long-term research project PERSES (personal service system), which aims to develop an interactive mobile shopping assistant that allows a continuous and intuitively understandable interaction with customers in a home store. Against this background, the paper describes a number of new or improved approaches, addressing challenges arising from the characteristics of the operation area, and from the need to continuously interact with users in a complex environment. With our approaches to vision-based or visually-controlled map building, self-localization and navigation as well as user localization and tracking, we want to make a contribution to the real-world suitability of interactive mobile service-robots in non-trivial application areas and demanding human-robot interaction scenarios.