Yuji Hosoda

Basic Design of Human-Symbiotic Robot EMIEW

We are developing a robot that supports people in their daily lives: a human-symbiotic robot. Such robot must share space with its users, be user-friendly, and be able to assist its users. We have developed a prototype autonomous mobile robot that makes use of a self-balancing two-wheeled mobile system and a body swing mechanism to shift its center of gravity. This allows it to move nimbly at up to 6 km per hour. It also has capabilities to avoid collisions with obstacles for moving safely through complex environments. Distant-speech-recognition and high-quality speech-synthesis technologies enable it to communicate with people naturally (i.e., without special tools). These capabilities were demonstrated at the 2005 World Exposition in Aichi, Japan

Collision-free navigation based on people tracking algorithm with biped walking model

This paper investigates a collision-free navigation algorithm for a mobile robot to work in daily environment which includes multiple walking people. The proposed algorithm consists of two main parts: recognizing walking people and collision-free path planning. For the recognition of randomly changing human walking motion, a people tracking method using laser range finder (LRF) is utilized. Robust people tracking could be achieved by embedding a new biped model with a walking frequency tracker, which can estimate the frequency of human walking motion and generate it continuously even in the case of no measurement owing to occlusion. For the other part, collision-free path planning, an iterative forecast and planning method with the concept of configuration space including space and time is employed. The position and velocity of walking people, given from people tracking algorithm, are exploited in path planning part as the information of obstacles that the robot have to avoid. The proposed method has been implemented on a real robot. It is also demonstrated with some experiments the tracking of multiple walking humans and robot navigation in indoor environment.

Collision-avoidance algorithm for human-symbiotic robot

A real-time collision-avoidance algorithm for human-symbiotic robots that are required to avoid multiple pedestrians was developed. An algorithm to predict the likelihood of a collision with obstacles was based on the relative velocities between a moving robot and multiple obstacles. An algorithm that can generate the optimum path sequence to a goal in real time was also developed. The collision-avoidance path is generated by repeating an operation to select two tangent paths that connect a via-point on a path to a collision circle of each obstacle that exists in the relative space. A robot-called EMIEW”-using these algorithms with a system for avoiding collisions with many obstacles moves at a speed of 0.8 m/s in a cluster of five people walking at 1.2 m/s. The repeat period for generating a new avoidance path is 0.5s, and the processing time for the developed algorithm in the each period is a maximum of 4 ms.