Toward A Ballbot for Physically Leading People: A Human-Centered Approach

Abstract

This work presents a new human-centered method for indoor service robots to provide people with physical assistance and active guidance while traveling through congested and narrow spaces. As most previous work is robotcentered, this paper develops an end-to-end framework which includes a feedback path of the measured human positions. The framework combines a planning algorithm and a humanrobot interaction module to guide the led person to a specified planned position. The approach is deployed on a person-size dynamically stable mobile robot, the CMU ballbot. Trials were conducted where the ballbot physically led a blindfolded person to safely navigate in a cluttered environment.