A life-support service robotmust avoid both static and dynamic obstacles for working in a real environment. Here, a static obstacle\nmeans an obstacle that does not move, and a dynamic obstacle is the one that moves. Assuming the robot is following a target\nperson, we discuss how the robot avoids a crowd through which the target person passes and arrives at the target position. The\npurpose of this paper is to propose a crowd avoidance method that makes a robot to be able to avoid both static and dynamic\nobstacles. The method uses the surface points of the obstacles to form an avoidance region, and the robot moves along the edge of\nthe region. We conducted experiments assuming various situations such that the robot was blocked, there was a wide gap in the\ncrowd, or a person in the crowd yielded for the robot to pass through. As an experimental result, it was confirmed the robot could\navoid the crowd even when the obstacles were aligned in an ââ?¬Å?inverted wedgeââ?¬Â shape.\n1. Introduction\nMany research works have been conducted for developing\nlife-support service robots [1]. Here, the robots we are\nfocusing on include autonomous mobile robots that conduct\ntasks such as bringing a beverage to the user based on the\nuserââ?¬â?¢s request [2, 3]. A life-support service robot differs from\nindustrial robots because the life-support service robotsmust\nwork under an environment where humans and the robots\ncoexist. For this purpose, a life-support service robot must\nhave several abilities such asmanipulation [4, 5], vision [6, 7],\nand mobility [8, 9]. We especially focus on the mobility in\nthis paper.The two technologies, the path planning, and the\npath following are important for realizing the autonomous\nnavigation of the robot.Many research works have been done\nfor those issues so far [10ââ?¬â??17]. The path planning and the following\nbehavior are either based on the prepared map of the\nenvironment or based on the on-the-fly measurement of the\nenvironment.We focus on the latter case so that the robot can\nmove around the new and dynamic environment where the\nobstacles (mainly humans) move. Our interest in this paper\nis the robot navigation based
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