People-following system design for mobile robots using kinect sensor

A system of Kinect-based people following for mobile robots is presented. The function of skeleton tracking of Kinect, a 3D somatosensory camera, is used to identify a specific person in the depth image. And then the position of the identified person in robot local coordinates is attained by using the ranging data obtained from the Kinect sensor. A rule-based control law is designed to keep the person in the center of depth images and in a fixed distance away from the mobile robot. Finally, a physical experiment in a corridor of an office building is shown.