IMU BASED SMARTPHONE CONTROLLED HUMAN FOLLOWING ROBOT WITH FALL DETECTION

The advancement in robotic technology has improved drastically in the past decade, from load carrying to assembling of huge aircrafts has made it easier and has reduced human labour. Furthermore, with technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning becoming pervasive robots are tending to grow smarter. Human following robots employing RFID and vision techniques like camera and laser are current trend in the market. But they all are mainly based on line of sight which implies that it cannot reacquire the target when lost. In this paper, a novel method is employed to obtain the human following feature using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Unlike the former techniques, using IMU would not pose any shortcomings of losing the target. The most important feature needed is the ability for the robot to follow that particular person. The application called the Hyper IMU is utilised to convert a regular Smartphone into a powerful IMU device. The availability of the sensors which are already embedded in the Smartphone these days is highly advantageous for the implementation of human following robot. The robot tracks the movement of the human and heads in the same direction as guided by the sensors. The implementation of ultrasonic sensor is to obtain obstacle detection which can avoid damages to the robot in case of its absence. Keywords— IMU, Ultrasonic sensor, HyperIMU, Smartphone, GSM, Fall Detection