Human- and Situation-Aware People Following

The paper presents an approach to intelligent, interactive people following for autonomous robots. The approach combines robust methods for simultaneous localization and mapping and for people tracking in order to yield a socially and environmentally sensitive people following behavior. Unlike current purely reactive approaches ("nearest point following") it enables the robot to follow a human in a socially acceptable way, providing verbal and non-verbal feedback to the user where necessary. At the same time, the robot makes use of information about the spatial and functional organization of its environment, so that it can anticipate likely actions performed by a human, and adjust its motion accordingly. As a result, the robot\´s behaviors become less reactive and more intuitive when following people around an indoor environment. The approach has been fully implemented and tested.