LRF-Based Human Following Robot by Tracking Legs

This paper presents a method to track and follow target person. A laser range finder (LRF) is used to measure highly accurate distance of objects with the range of 180 degrees. First of all, the erroneous data are excluded due to the error of LRF. Then all the raw sensor data are separated into many groups when the difference of the measuring distances of two adjacent laser points are beyond a limited value. For each group, the width is calculated, and it is considered as human legs if the defined conditions are satisfied. Finally, a real-time human following experiment with a SICK LRF and PIONEER mobile robot is done to validate our proposed method.