Abstract
This paper addresses the introduction of a new Human Robot Interaction (HRI) sensor for guide robots. Guide robots for geriatric patients or the visually impaired should follow user's control command, keeping a certain desired distance allowing the user to work freely. Therefore, it is necessary to acquire control commands and a user's position on a real-time basis. We suggest a new sensor fusion system to achieve this objective and we will call this sensor the “intelligent lead”. The objective of the intelligent lead is to acquire a stable distance from the user to the robot, speed-control volume and turn-control volume, even when the robot platform with the intelligent lead is shaken on uneven ground. In this paper we explain a precise Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) procedure for this. The intelligent lead physically consists of a Kinect sensor, the serial linkage attached with eight rotary encoders, and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and their measurements are fused by the EKF. A mobile robot was designed to test the performance of the proposed sensor system. After installing the intelligent lead in the mobile robot, several tests are conducted to verify that the mobile robot with the intelligent lead is capable of achieving its goal points while maintaining the appropriate distance between the robot and the user. The results show that we can use the intelligent lead proposed in this paper as a new HRI sensor joined a joystick and a distance measure in the mobile environments such as the robot and the user are moving at the same time.
Highlights
There are approximately 285 million visually impaired people around the globe
We introduced the intelligent lead as a new Human Robot Interaction (HRI) sensor
To detect the user’s hand position, we made a serial linkage consisting of eight rotary encoders and we constructed the intelligent lead with the Kinect sensor, the serial linkage and MTi sensor as an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)
Summary
There are approximately 285 million visually impaired people around the globe. 90% of the visually handicapped live in developing countries [1]. In Korea, there are approximately 45,000 visually impaired people. They are provided with only 60~70 guide dogs. Due to the aging of the population, the numbers of geriatric patients who suffer from dementia or poor physical health are on the rise. It is important to develop guide robots for the elderly as well as for the visually handicapped
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