A Study of Ultrasonic Sensor Capability in Human Following Robot System

Abstract

Human following robot is very common in this technology era. Human following is a technique used by robot and autonomous vehicles to follow a human within a specific range. In this case, communication between the human and the robot is the most significant factor where sensor is needed to ensure its successfulness. This paper discussed a human following robot system that utilized ultrasonic sensor. Ultrasonic sensor is preferred for human following robot due to its wide detection area, less light dependency, the ability to detect glass and shining wall, smaller in size, lightweight, use a very low memory, cheaper than Laser Range Finder (LRF) or camera and lower power consumption. However, being a specular type of sensor and not narrowly focused, this can cause wrong estimation and recognition of human, especially at the legs. Therefore, necessary accompanying algorithms should be developed to encounter this issue. Here, three pieces 40 kHz ultrasonic sensors are mounted on the four-wheeled mobile robot platform. Ultrasonic sensors used to detect the human’s leg, and the data collected from the sensors were used upon the design of sensor platform. In order to detect human’s leg, the sensor platform was tested repeatedly to obtain optimum data. The data which have been collected from the ultrasonic sensor will then be interfaced with Arduino software. Thus, this paper outlines a set of benchmarks for human following and briefly evaluates its performances. The human following robot was tested in a real laboratory environment. The results were good, where the implementation of this algorithm is able to produce an accurate decision.