Person-Following Shopping Support Robot Using Kinect Depth Camera Based on 3D Skeleton Tracking

Abstract

The lack of caregivers in an aging society is a major social problem. Without assistance, many of the elderly and disabled are unable to perform daily tasks. One important daily activity is shopping in supermarkets. Pushing a shopping cart and moving it from shelf to shelf is tiring and laborious, especially for customers with certain disabilities or the elderly. To alleviate this problem, we develop a person following shopping support robot using a Kinect camera that can recognize customer shopping actions or activities. Our robot can follow within a certain distance behind the customer. Whenever our robot detects the customer performing a “hand in shelf” action in front of a shelf it positions itself beside the customer with a shopping basket so that the customer can easily put his or her product in the basket. Afterwards, the robot again follows the customer from shelf to shelf until he or she is done with shopping. We conduct our experiments in a real supermarket to evaluate its effectiveness.