Domestic interaction on a segway base

Abstract

To be useful in a home environment, an assistive robot needs to be capable of a broad range of interactive activities such as locating objects, following specific people, and distinguishing among different people. This paper presents a Segway-based robot that successfully performed all of these tasks en route to a second place finish in the RoboCup@Home 2007 competition. The main contribution is a complete description and analysis of the robot system and its implemented algorithms that enabled the robot's successful human-robot interaction in this broad and challenging forum. We describe in detail a novel person recognition algorithm, a key component of our overall success, that included two co-trained classifiers, each focusing on different aspects of the person (face and shirt color). © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.