Autonomous Navigation in Dynamic Human Environments with an Embedded 2D LiDAR-based Person Tracker

In the rapidly evolving landscape of autonomous mobile robots, the emphasis on seamless human-robot interactions has shifted towards autonomous decision-making. This paper delves into the intricate challenges associated with robotic auton-omy, focusing on navigation in dynamic environments shared with humans. It introduces an embedded real-time tracking pipeline, integrated into a navigation planning framework for effective person tracking and avoidance, adapting a state-of-the-art 2D LiDAR-based human detection network and an efficient multi-object tracker. By addressing the key components of detection, tracking, and planning separately, the proposed approach high-lights the modularity and transferability of each component to other applications. Our tracking approach is validated on a quadruped robot equipped with 270°2D-LiDAR against motion capture system data, with the preferred configuration achieving an average MOTA of 85.45% in three newly recorded datasets, while reliably running in real-time at 20 Hz on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX embedded GPU-accelerated platform. Furthermore, the integrated tracking and avoidance system is evaluated in real-world navigation experiments, demonstrating how accurate person tracking benefits the planner in optimizing the generated trajectories, enhancing its collision avoidance capabilities. This paper contributes to safer human-robot cohabitation, blending recent advances in human detection with responsive planning to navigate shared spaces effectively and securely.