Null-space based control for human escorting by using Mobile Robots

DANIEL HERRERA ANDA; JAVIER GIMENEZ; JUAN MARCOS TOIBERO; RICARDO CARELLI

Medellín

Congreso; Latin American Conference on Automatic Control; 2016

Universidad EAFIT

Sharing the workspace or interacting directly with people in a social way is currently a key challenge in the design of mobile robot applications. An interesting field of study is related with the so-called hidden dimension, which relates the sense of security that a human feels when interacting with another one. Therefore, the researchers have been interested in developing human friendly applications by abstracting social cues for the robotic design. One of these is the social zone, which acts like repulsive potential fields, and if it is not respected, an uncomfortable situation for humans is produced. In robotics, many approaches have been proposed to define and to avoid these fields, where it has been proved 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 behavior-based paradigm. It is made emphasis in the evasion of other humans in the environment by considering them as elliptical potential fields with non-holonomic motion. Finally, simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed control algorithm.