Development of a mobile robot moving on a handrail —Control for preceding a person keeping a distance

In this paper, we propose a unique robot that moves on a handrail installed at corridors of buildings like hospitals. The robot guides the guests of the building. Because it moves on the handrail along the corridor, it naturally moves along the corridor without conflicting other people and needs less cost for estimating its position compared with human-sized mobile robots. We propose a method to control this robot so that it precedes a few steps before the person to be guided. We examine two methods: one is a method to keep a fixed distance from the person, and the other one is a method where the robot keeps moving slowly even when the robot and the person is distant. From the experiment, the latter method was more efficient than the former method.