Interactive Motion Planning for Autonomous Robotic Photo Taking

In this paper, a motion planning method is proposed for an autonomous photo-taking robot. The developed human-robot interactive motion planning and control system is based on face recognition and facial pose estimation of a target person. The target person's location is estimated after combined with robot self-localization result. Then the goal position and orientation of the robot are determined for autonomous photo-taking of the specific person. An APP for mobile phones has been integrated to select the target person and transmit the command to the robot for photo taking. After receiving the command, the robot autonomously navigates to the goal location and shoots pictures of the target person. Experimental results show that the experimental mobile robot can recognize the specific person, regardless the person is stand alone or in a crowd. The robot completed two types of picture-taking tasks by using the proposed method.