Human-following robot using infrared camera

Human-following robots have been researched and developed actively these decades due to its plentiful applications in daily life and manufacturing. A human-following robot requires several techniques such as human's target detection, robot control algorithm and obstacles avoidance. Various approaches of following robots have been proposed such as using ultrasonic sensors, voice recognition sensors, laser range sensors, charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and so on. These technologies detect the relative position between a mobile robot and a human. In this paper, we present a new approach in detecting position of a mobile robot using an infrared camera which is the basic technique in human following robot. In our experiment, a Wii camera, which captures four groups of IR-LEDs installed on the robot, is attached on a human. A simple application implemented in real time using a PI controller shows some advantages of the proposed method.