Abstract
A person following robot is an application of service robotics that primarily focuses on human-robot interaction, for example, in security and health care. This paper explores some of the design and development challenges of a patient follower robot. Our motivation stemmed from common mobility challenges associated with patients holding on and pulling the medical drip stand. Unlike other designs for person following robots, the proposed design objectives need to preserve as much as patient privacy and operational challenges in the hospital environment. We placed a single camera closer to the ground, which can result in a narrower field of view to preserve patient privacy. Through a unique design of artificial markers placed on various hospital clothing, we have shown how the visual tracking algorithm can determine the spatial location of the patient with respect to the robot. The robot control algorithm is implemented in three parts: (a) patient detection; (b) distance estimation; and (c) trajectory controller. For patient detection, the proposed algorithm utilizes two complementary tools for target detection, namely, template matching and colour histogram comparison. We applied a pinhole camera model for the estimation of distance from the robot to the patient. We proposed a novel movement trajectory planner to maintain the dynamic tipping stability of the robot by adjusting the peak acceleration. The paper further demonstrates the practicality of the proposed design through several experimental case studies.
Highlights
One of the common types of service robotics is a person following robot, which has found applications in several fields such as security, surveillance, and elderly monitoring [1, 2]
A nurse following robot can efficiently reduce the workload for nurses and health delivery system [3]. e design and development of an autonomous mobile robot to haul and transport hospital supplies and improving hospital efficiency was proposed in [4]
Patients need to manually pull their drip stand to accommodate it along with their motion patterns. e patient usually holds on to the stand on their side and ensures that there is adequate slack in the feeding tubes. rough study of various notions for better design of a patient interaction system, this paper proposes a novel design of a robotic system. e system can autonomously follow the patient from behind and ensures that there exists a proper distance between the drip stand and the patient for a given allowable slack in the infusion tubes
Summary
One of the common types of service robotics is a person following robot, which has found applications in several fields such as security, surveillance, and elderly monitoring [1, 2]. The proposed design of an autonomous drip-stand patient follower robot can offer a more convenient tool for ease of patient mobility and support during their movements in the hospital. Additional sensing modality based on depth sensing is utilized only for performance comparison study with the computational model obtained through an RGB camera. Journal of Robotics e overall performance requirements for an autonomous drip stand are similar to that of person following robot. E Bhattacharyya coefficients are used to compute the similarity between the previously selected target and potential targets Another approach to use to track an object is by using an RGB-D sensor in combination with other sensing modalities such as laser and thermal sensing.
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