Null-space based control for human following and social field avoidance

DANIEL HERRERA; MATÍAS MONLLOR; DIEGO SANTIAGO; FLAVIO ROBERTI; RICARDO CARELLI

Mar del Plata

Workshop; XVII Reunión de trabajo en Procesamiento de la Información y Control; 2017

Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata

The development of human-friendly applications arefocused on abstracting social behaviors as part of the roboticdesign. The most important is without doubt the social zone,which acts like a repulsive potential field to protect the personalspace of humans and in consequence to avoid its intrusion. Inrobotics, many approaches have been proposed to define andto avoid these fields, which contributes to improve the humancomfort during interactions. This paper proposes a novel nullspace-based (NSB) algorithm for a non-holonomic mobile robotplatform, which is programmed to escort a human in a behaviourbasedparadigm. The emphasis is posed in the evasion of otherhumans in the environment by considering them as ellipticalpotential fields with non-holonomic motion. Finally, experimentalresults are presented to show the performance of the proposedcontrol algorithm with static and dynamic human obstacles.