Follow me robot using bluetooth-based position estimation

Human-Following robots are being actively researched for their immense potential to carry out mundane tasks like load carrying and monitoring of target individual through interaction and collaboration. The recent advancements in vision and sensor technologies have helped in creating more user-friendly robots that are able to coexist with humans by leveraging the sensors for human detection, human movement estimation, collision avoidance, and obstacle avoidance. But most of these sensors are suitable only for Line of Sight following of human. In the case of loss of sight of the target, most of them fail to re-acquire their target. In this paper, we are proposing a novel method to develop a human following robot using Bluetooth and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) on Smartphones which can work under high interference environment and can reacquire the target when lost. The proposed method leverages IMU sensors on the smartphone to estimate the direction of human movement while estimating the distance traveled from the RSSI of the Bluetooth. Thus, the Follow Me robot which estimates the position of target human and direction of heading and effectively track the person was implemented using Smartphone on a differential drive robot.