Using a spatio-temporal FastMarching planner to politely avoid moving persons

Abstract

When mobile robots operate in home environments, a robot should consider the inhabitants while moving around. In this work, an approach is presented, which at the one hand predicts the movements of a person in a very simple way, and on the other hand uses the predicted movement to plan a motion path of the robot. We deploy a potential field approach to predict the person's movement trajectory and use an modified Fast Marching planner to access a time-variable cost function for the planning process. The goal of our development is an early avoiding behavior of the robot, when the robot passes a person. This should increase the acceptance of the robot, and signal a "busy"-behavior. We show the feasibility of the presented approach in some first simulation results. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.