Abstract
We are developing a robot that can play an outdoor game with children. In realizing such a robot, the person detection and tracking methods play an important role. In this paper, we propose methods for improving person detection and tracking using a laser range finder (LRF). A problem facing player detection using an LRF during play is that detection of a player’s body sometimes fails because of the posture of the player. Thus, we propose two improvements of the conventional person detection algorithm. One is to determine the body boundary when an arm overlaps the body, and the other is to choose the most probable object as the body among the detected objects. Another problem is how to track players who are hidden by other players. We introduce a new algorithm to robustly track a player even when the player is behind other players. We conducted three experiments. In the first experiment, we investigate the performance improvement by the proposed player detection algorithm. The second experiment proves that the proposed player-tracking algorithm can robustly track a player even after the LRF has lost that player. In the last experiment, we conduct the game Darumasan ga Koronda using the developed system and confirm that the system can perform the game without large problems.
Highlights
The research and development of robots that play with humans have been conducted since the late 1980s [1,2,3]
In “The game and the previous works” section, we briefly describe the rules of the game, and we review the previous works on person detection and tracking
In “Analysis and improvement of person detection” section, we propose an improvement over the person detection method using an laser range finder (LRF)
Summary
The research and development of robots that play with humans have been conducted since the late 1980s [1,2,3]. Since the beginning of the project, many robots that play soccer have been developed [5,6,7,8]. The robots that play with children, especially the ones that play physical games such as sports, need to move around humans to achieve specific tasks. Developing such robots is a large challenge and includes ensuring safety for both human and robot, human-robot communication, understanding of human behavior, etc. We have developed a robot that plays the Darumasan ga koronda game with children [9, 10].
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