Towards Out-of-Sight Predictive Tracking for Long-Term Indoor Navigation of Non-Holonomic Person Following Robot*

The ability to predict the movements of the target person allows a person following robot (PFR) to coexist with the person while still complying with the social norms. In human-robot collaboration, this is an essential requisite for long-term time-dependent navigation and not losing sight of the person during momentary occlusions that may arise from a crowd due to static or dynamic obstacles, other human beings, or intersections in the local surrounding. The PFR must not only traverse to the previously unknown goal position but also relocate the target person after the miss, and resume following. In this paper, we try to solve this as a coupled motion-planning and control problem by formulating a model predictive control (MPC) controller with non-linear constraints for a wheeled differential-drive robot. And, using a human motion prediction strategy based on the recorded pose and trajectory information of both the moving target person and the PFR, add additional constraints to the same MPC, to recompute the optimal controls to the wheels. We make comparisons with RNNs like LSTM and Early Relocation for learning the best-predicted reference path.MPC is best suited for complex constrained problems because it allows the PFR to periodically update the tracking information, as well as to adapt to the moving person’s stride. We show the results using a simulated indoor environment and lay the foundation for its implementation on a real robot. Our proposed method offers a robust person following behaviour without the explicit need for policy learning or offline computation, allowing us to design a generalized framework.