A Collision-Free Person-Following Approach Based on Path Planning

Person following is a crucial capability for mobile robots in tasks of human assistance and cooperation. In this paper, a person-following approach based on path planning is proposed for mobile robots, which takes person following and obstacle avoidance into account in a unified framework. The proposed approach is comprised of a sensing module and a planning module. The sensing module with a camera and a 3D LiDAR is employed to locate the target person and perceive obstacles. For the planning module, the combination of global planner and local planner effectively outputs collision-free paths and control commands for a mobile robot to keep following the target person. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach.