Finding People in Apartments with a Mobile Robot

Mobile companion robots for elderly people are subject to recent research efforts. To provide useful services the robot must be aware of the position of the user. Since the field-of-view of the robot is limited, the user can easily leave the robot´s perception, e.g. by going to another room. This paper proposes a method to search and locate a person not in the vicinity of the robot by driving through the apartment and checking for people. We apply restrictive as well as computationally expensive detection methods on-demand to verify the hypotheses of a real time person tracker. Additionally, the search-tour of the robot is guided by an occurrence probability histogram of previous positions of the user. The system has been tested by evaluating accuracy and time the robot needs to find a user in a 3-room scenario.