Visibility-based viewpoint planning for guard robot using skeletonization and geodesic motion model

This paper describes a viewpoint planning algorithm for a guard robot in an indoor environment. The viewpoint planner is used for the guard robot to watch a certain object such as human continuously. Rather than continuously follows the object, moving the guard robot using the viewpoint planner has many benefits such as reducing the movement and the energy used by the robot. Our viewpoint planner exploits the topology feature of the environment, which is extracted using a skeletonization technique to get a set of viewpoints. We search for escaping gaps from which the target may go out of the robot´s sight, and make the movement model of the target and the robot to determine the predicted time of the worst case escape of the target. We then plan the action for the robot based on the geodesic model and escaping gaps. Simulation results using 3D simulator are provided to show the effectiveness and feasibility of our algorithm.