A NURSE FOLLOWING ROBOT WITH HIGH SPEED KINECT SENSOR

This paper highlights on the development of a nurse following robot. A Nurse following robot is a personal robot to help the nurse to do their jobs every day. This robot will follow the nurse from bed to bed while carrying belongings such patients’ medical files, medicine and other equipment. The tracking system has been designed using a high speed vision system, which is Kinect sensor for Xbox 360 video games. The Kinect sensor uses the human skeleton tracking method to track the position and distance of the nurse. The human skeleton tracking method has the ability to distinguish a person and other object without confusing it. All the information about the position and distance of the nurse will be synchronized with the whole system of the robot. A laptop is used in this research to process the data from the Kinect sensor and transferred to the microcontroller. The robot has also been equipped with obstacle avoidance system to sense obstacles around it while following the nurse. The robot is able to follow the nurse either in straight or curve part without losing him/her. It is also designed for indoor application due to limitation of Kinect sensor capabilities. Keyword: kinect sensor, processing.org, high speed vision system, BASIC stamp.