Human escorting by using mobile robots: a null-space based approach

TOIBERO, J. M.; JAVIER GIMÉNEZ; RICARDO CARELLI; DANIEL HERRERA; FLAVIO ROBERTI

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 25º Congreso Argentino de Control Automático; 2016

Asociación Argentina de Control Automático

Currently, the researchers have been interested in developing humanfriendly applications by abstracting social cues for the robotic design. One of these is the social zone, which acts like a repulsive potential eld, and if it is not respected, an uncomfortable situation for humans is produced. In robotics, many approaches have been proposed to dene and to avoid these elds, which contributes to improve the human comfort during interactions at least from a qualitative perspective. This paper proposes a novel null-space-based (NSB) algorithm for a non-holonomic mobile robot platform, which is programmed to escort a human in a behaviour-based paradigm. The emphasis is posed in the evasion of other humans in the environment by considering them as elliptical potential elds with non-holonomic motion. Finally, simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed control algorithm.