Human-robot interaction (HRI) has become a crucial enabler in houses and industries for facilitating operational flexibility. When it comes to mobile collaborative robots, this flexibility can be further increased due to the autonomous mobility and navigation capacity of the robotic agents, expanding their workspace and consequently, the personalizable assistance they can provide to the human operators. This however requires that the robot is capable of detecting and identifying the human counterpart in all stages of the collaborative task, and in particular while following a human in crowded workplaces. To respond to this need, we developed a unified perception and navigation framework, which enables the robot to identify and follow a target person using a combination of visual Re-Identification (Re-ID), hand gestures detection, and collision-free navigation. The Re-ID module can autonomously learn the features of a target person and use the acquired knowledge to visually re-identify the target. The navigation stack is used to follow the target avoiding obstacles and other individuals in the environment. Experiments are conducted with few subjects in a laboratory setting where some unknown dynamic obstacles are introduced.
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