A Study on the Mobile Robot which Passes a Man

The purpose of this study was to investigate avoidance motion of man and its applicability to a mobile robot. The avoidance motion includes characteristics of passing of humans. These characteristics were obtained from the results of the following experiments. Firstly, many human passing motions were recorded by VTR to analyze human avoidance motions under natural settings on the road. The analysis of the VTR recordings revealed that there were three types of human avoidance motion in passing. The most frequent type observed was as follows: The subject returned to the original locus he had before starting avoidance motion, after the subject had finished passing. Then, a human's passing experiment was conducted in a laboratory using the motion type for constructing an algorithm there of. The results showed that human avoidance motion in passing has two main characteristics; (1) the locus agrees well with the catenary, (2) the walking speed is constant in passing. A basic human avoidance algorithm was constructed using these results. Finally, a mobile robot having a distance measuring system with ultrasonic sensors was developed. The system detects relative distance and relative velocity of man, and the robot realizes passing motion using the avoidance motion algorithm.