PERSES-a vision-based interactive mobile shopping assistant

The paper describes the general idea, the application scenario, and selected methodological approaches of our long term research project PERSES (PERsonal SErvice System). The aim of the project consists of the development of an interactive mobile shopping assistant that allows a continuous and intuitively understandable interaction with a customer in a home improvement store. Typical tasks we have to tackle are to detect and contact potential users in the operation area, to guide them to desired areas or articles within the store or to follow them as a mobile information kiosk while continuously observing their behavior. Due to the specificity of the interaction-oriented scenario and the characteristics of the operation area, we have focused on vision based methods for both human-robot interaction and robot navigation. Besides some methodological approaches, we present preliminary results of experiments achieved with our mobile robot PERSES in the store with an emphasis on vision based methods for user localization, map building and self-localization.