Development of Following Vehicle Prototype using Robot Operating System

A following vehicle can significantly reduce fatigue in people who want a hands-free walk. The vehicle follows a person and carries heavy things for him/her so that the person can walk in comfort without the burden of carrying the heavy things. Robot Operating System, ROS, is a software framework which is widely adopted for the development of automated guided vehicles, AGVs. Following vehicles and AGVs share many similarities. Both of them can move goods and autonomously plan their paths without manual intervention. Thus, this paper proposes a following vehicle prototype utilizing ROS. In a ROS robot, we integrate a program to measure the power present in received radio signals from a radio transmitter attached to the person it follows. The measurements indicate the approximate distance between the following vehicle and its user. The vehicle, then, moves toward the user based on the estimated distance. The experiment results prove that the proposed prototype can correctly follow the movement of its user in a linear direction with an obvious but acceptable delay.