Lidar-based Human Detection for a Mobile Robot in Social Environment using Deep Learning

Nowadays, robotics implementation spans industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and logistics, integrating AI-driven capabilities to enhance efficiency and collaboration in diverse operational environments. The ability to respond and interact while considering human presence is crucial for a mobile robot to operate effectively and be accepted in a human social environment. It is necessary to make a robot that can detect the presence of humans around it to make it capable of navigating while considering the social environment. Meanwhile, considering that the lidar sensor is almost always available in many robot navigation cases, it becomes an accessible tool for detecting the presence of humans in its surroundings. We brought the one-dimensional lidar data into two-dimensional image data, then involved some object selection based on weak characteristics, such as the acceptable range radius of the object and the acceptable distance between two legs. The result of the process is a group of human candidates. We use a deep learning model with a pretrained mobilenetv3 model as the feature extractor to ensure whether the candidates are humans and a fully connected layer of neural networks as the classifier. We defined several scenarios in an indoor environment to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. The experiment results show the system’s performance with a precision score of 0.902, a recall score of 0.782, and an F1 score of 0.837.