Autonomous Identification of Human Activity Regions

Abstract: Human activity regions (HARs) are human-centric semantic partitions where observing and/or interacting with humans is likely in indoor environments. HARs are useful for achieving successful human-robot interaction, such as in safe navigation around a building or to know where to be able to assist humans in their activities. In this thesis, a system is designed for generating HARs automatically based on data recorded by robots. This approach to generating HARs is to cluster the areas that are commonly associated with frequent human presence. In order to detect human positions, we employ state-of-the-art perception techniques. The environment that the robot patrols is assumed to be an indoor environment such as an office. We show how we can generate HARs in correct regions by clustering human position data. The experimental evaluations show that we can do so in different indoor environments, with data acquired from different sensors and that the system can handle noise.