Toward a Person-Follower Robot

In this article we described the attempt to build a robot able to locate and follow an human target moving in a domestic environment. After a brief review of the state of the art in relative location technologies, we described our approach that aims to develop robots provided with simple and robust relative location technologies that do not require to structure the environment and on simple semi-reactive strategies that does not require the use of internal maps and the ability to self-localize. More specifically, the approach is based on a control system able to display and integrate an exploration, obstacle avoidance, and target following behavior and a relative location device based on an signal emitter (placed on the target person) and a directional sensor (placed on the mobile robot).