Improving robot reactivity to passers-by with a faster people detector

Abstract

Perceptual systems deployed in embedded intelligent systems are handicapped with limited computation resources. As a result, they require explicit computation time consideration during design time. In this paper, we investigate the impact a visual person detector explicitly optimized to minimize computational time has on an exemplar robotic application -navigation in human shared environments. The experimental results attest the improved perceptual frame rate leads to significant improvements in vision system performance and robotic mission success rate.