Development of a Person Following Mobile Robot in Complicated Background by Using Distance and Color Information

This paper presents a person following mobile robot which follows a target subject while tracking one´s back. The developed robot carries out autonomous movement in a real environment based on the information obtained from a loaded stereo camera, a laser ranger sensor, ultrasonic sensors and touch sensors. An image processing method which detects the subject in a complicated background using distance and color information on is proposed. For image processing, a specific person is discovered by the disparity image and color distribution matching by stereo camera. The robot´s movement is controlled by the results of the image processing and the information obtained from the various sensors. The proposed image processor is applying to a mobile robot, and the results showed the mobile robot to follow the target subject in a real environment