Autonomous Shopping Cart Platform for People with Mobility Impairments

Abstract : Providing a platform able to interact with a spe- cific user is a challenging problem for assistance technologies. Among the many platforms accomplishing this task, we address the problem of designing an autonomous shopping cart. We assume that the shopping cart is set-up on a unicycle-like robot endowed with two sensors: an RGB-D camera and a planar laser range finder. To combine the information from these two sensors, a data fusion algorithm has been developed using a particle filter, augmented with a k-clustering step to extract person estimations. The problem of stabilizing the robot's position at a fixed distance from the user has been solved through classical control design. Results on a real mobile platform verify the effectiveness of the approach here proposed.