People tracking method for a mobile robot with laser scanner and omni directional camera

This paper presents a recognition method for a mobile robot to track running people in outdoor environment. Generally, after the cluttered state that a human is hidden by others and cannot be detected, it is difficult to recover only by position information with laser scanner. The problem causes an association error missing the past motion trajectory of human objects. Therefore, we investigated a method to solve the problem using the color information by an omni directional camera as an additional sensor to laser scanner. The proposed method was tested by some experiments with the developed robot.