Development of Autonomous Mobile Robot Control System for Changeable Target-of-interest Object Tracking using Specific Vest

To support delivery tasks using autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), an AMR tracks target-of-interest (ToI) objects, such as workers. ToI objects that are tracked using AMRs are specified in advance or through the robot's settings. It is difficult for an object to be directly set as a ToI object. By making an AMR follow a ToI object wearing a specific vest, the object can be set easily. As such, it is essential to develop a ToI object tracking system that can follow a ToI object wearing a specific vest with AMR. This paper proposes a ToI object tracking system using a specific vest to track changeable ToI objects. The proposed system comprises a recognition unit to recognize a ToI object wearing a specific vest and a control unit to control the AMR. The recognition unit tracks the ToI object and estimates its position while the control unit controls the AMR based on the ToI object’s position. The contributions of this paper are as follows. 1) A system that can follow a changeable ToI object is proposed. 2) This tracking system can easily designate and change ToI objects. In the experiment, the proposed system enabled the AMR to track a changeable ToI object. The recognition unit then calculated the position of the ToI object wearing a specific vest, and the control unit calculated a control signal for the AMR to track the ToI object based on its position. © ICROS 2023.