Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea.
Sensors (Basel). 2012;12(6):8301-18. doi: 10.3390/s120608301. Epub 2012 Jun 14.
This paper addresses the introduction of a new Human Robot Interaction (HRI) sensor for guide robots. Guide robots for geriatric patients or the visually impaired should follow user's control command, keeping a certain desired distance allowing the user to work freely. Therefore, it is necessary to acquire control commands and a user's position on a real-time basis. We suggest a new sensor fusion system to achieve this objective and we will call this sensor the "intelligent lead". The objective of the intelligent lead is to acquire a stable distance from the user to the robot, speed-control volume and turn-control volume, even when the robot platform with the intelligent lead is shaken on uneven ground. In this paper we explain a precise Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) procedure for this. The intelligent lead physically consists of a Kinect sensor, the serial linkage attached with eight rotary encoders, and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and their measurements are fused by the EKF. A mobile robot was designed to test the performance of the proposed sensor system. After installing the intelligent lead in the mobile robot, several tests are conducted to verify that the mobile robot with the intelligent lead is capable of achieving its goal points while maintaining the appropriate distance between the robot and the user. The results show that we can use the intelligent lead proposed in this paper as a new HRI sensor joined a joystick and a distance measure in the mobile environments such as the robot and the user are moving at the same time.
本文提出了一种新的用于导览机器人的人机交互（HRI）传感器。用于老年患者或视障人士的导览机器人应根据用户的控制命令进行跟随，保持一定的期望距离，以允许用户自由活动。因此，有必要实时获取控制命令和用户的位置。我们建议采用一种新的传感器融合系统来实现这一目标，我们将这种传感器称为“智能导引线”。智能导引线的目的是即使在机器人平台随智能导引线在不平坦的地面上晃动时，也能稳定地保持用户与机器人之间的距离、速度控制量和转向控制量。本文详细说明了一种精确的扩展卡尔曼滤波器（EKF）方法来实现这一目标。智能导引线物理上由一个 Kinect 传感器、八个旋转编码器组成的串联连杆和一个惯性测量单元（IMU）组成，它们的测量值由 EKF 融合。设计了一个移动机器人来测试所提出的传感器系统的性能。在移动机器人上安装智能导引线后，进行了多次测试，以验证带有智能导引线的移动机器人能够在保持机器人和用户之间适当距离的同时到达目标点。结果表明，我们可以将本文提出的智能导引线用作新的 HRI 传感器，与移动机器人等移动环境中的操纵杆和距离测量仪结合使用，此时机器人和用户同时移动。
