A Method for Map Buiding and Navigation of Mobile Robots by Observing Walking Human

It is fundamental problem for mobile robots to detect 2D free regions where they can move by local sensing. In many indoor environments, there may be lots of objects, such as chairs, desks, etc., and much portion of the free region can not be directly detected. To resolve this problem, we have developed a method for detecting free regions in which a robot visually tracks walking human, and regards 2D regions swept by the human as free regions. Based on this idea, we propose a method for building a map of obstacles and free regions, and navigation with an distance transform based path planning algorithm. The free regions were obtained reliably by combining stereo vision and visual tracking techniques.