People following behaviour in an industrial enviroment using laser and stereo camera

Abstract

Mobile robots have a large application potential in industrial shop floors, improving the human action in this kind of environments. The productivity can be greatly increased while reducing cost, particularly for surface operations such as material transport, survey and sampling. In this paper a system able to follow a worker in an industrial environment based on information provided by a laser scan and a stereo camera is presented. In order to accomplish this goal, a probabilistic approach for human leg detection based on data provided by a laser scan is used, enhanced with an histogram based depth detector. The proposed approach also integrates tracking techniques as Kalman Filters to endow the system with an error recovering tool to be used in a real environment. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.