Carrier Bot: A UWB-based Human Following Mobile Platform for Intra-Office Transport with an Intuitive Teach-and-Repeat Programming

Despite the rapid development in robotics, the use of mobile robots in everyday life is currently not yet widespread. The complicated programming interface of mobile robots is often an obstacle to use for people who are not technically proficient. To this end, we present a novel method for teach-and-repeat of mobile robots by Ultra-Wideband (UWB) based human following. This approach has the following two advantages. First, the human following using UWB releases capacities for parallel activities during the teach-in process. Second, the programming of the robot path is conducted directly on the robot hardware using a self-developed UWB-based handset, which reduces setup time. Real-world experiments are conducted using our in-house developed mobile robot platform, the "Carrier Bot", whose hardware design has been specially selected to facilitate ease of use for indoor teach-in programming. Experiments show that the proposed system can reach a repeatability of 0.05 m of at least 12 meters path.