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 - RPIC 2017; 2017

ICYTE (Instituto de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas en Electrónica) que depende del CONICET y de la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata.

The development of human-friendly applications are focused on abstracting social behaviors as part of the robotic design. 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. In robotics, many approaches have been proposed to define and to avoid these fields, which contributes to improve the human comfort during interactions. This paper proposes a novel nullspace-based (NSB) algorithm for a non-holonomic mobile robot platform, which is programmed to escort a human in a behaviour basedparadigm. The emphasis is posed in the evasion of other humans in the environment by considering them as elliptical potential fields with non-holonomic motion. Finally, experimental results are presented to show the performance of the proposed control algorithm with static and dynamic human obstacles.