Detection of lounging people with a mobile robot companion

Abstract

This paper deals with the task of searching for people in home environments with a mobile robot. The robust estimation of the user's position is an important prerequisite for human robot interaction. While detecting people in an upright pose is mainly solved, most of the user's various poses in living environments are hard to detect. We present a visual approach for the detection of people resting at previously known seating places in arbitrary poses, e.g. lying on a sofa. The method utilizes color and gradient models of the environment and a color model of the user's appearance. Evaluation is done on real-world experiments with the robot searching for the user at different places. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.