Robust Adaptive Following by UWB Sensors and High-precision Gyroscope for Industrial Assistance Robots

Assistance robots are popular implemented in many industrial automatic manufactures. In particular, instead of carrying heavy object by hand, workers utilize industrial assistance robots to deal with non-easy handling stuff. Robots can also assist in completing tasks well when the goods need to be sent to a production workshop. Usually robots need to follow people to reach the destination. In this process, a robust adaptive following is necessarily used. Many previous researches were focused on vision-tracking following approaches or line tracking method for designing autonomous following. However, vision-tracking following is limited by light environment and line tracking method is only used in specific route. This paper proposed a novel following method combined UWB Sensors (Ultra-Wideband Sensors) and high-precision gyroscope to track and follow the target. When sensitivity of UWB Sensors declines because of the complex dynamic environment, high-precision gyroscope helps robot to identify the target and continue to follow it. The experimental results show that the combination of a variety of sensors and advanced algorithms could effectively deal with the problem caused by few sensors following method and achieve robust adaptive following in dynamic environment.