A novel multi-target recognition method based on heatable marker for human following robots

In this paper, a novel multi-target recognition method based on heatable marker which is consisted of a plurality of parallel-arranged carbon fibers is proposed. Every carbon fiber beam can be heated independently, and a binary rule is used to code the carbon fiber. The marker is worn around on the user’s waist so that robots will perceive obvious thermal radiation characteristics regardless whether the human is toward, lateral or turns his back to robots. A portable controller which is convenient for the human to carry around is designed to realize the temperature control. The distance between the robot and the human can also be obtained by a UWB model. Experiments show that the coded marker can be recognized and decoded accurately, and it can meet the requirement of multi-target detection tasks.