Overview
FollowMe is a person-following navigation system I designed and developed as a Robotics Software Engineer Intern at the NICE Centre for Agricultural Robotics and Technology (NICE CART) in Wuxi, China. The robot locks onto a person and follows them in real time.
How it works
The system integrates perception, tracking and motion planning on a ROS 2 / Nav2 stack:
- Human tracking → navigation. Human tracking outputs are integrated into the navigation stack, with motion prediction so the robot can anticipate where the person is heading.
- Occlusion handling. When the person is temporarily hidden, the system re-acquires them once they reappear instead of losing the target.
- Planning. Several global and local planners were tested within Nav2, including Smac2D and the Timed Elastic Band (TEB) controller, each integrated and tuned to evaluate how well it could follow a moving target safely and smoothly in dynamic environments.
Field work
Alongside FollowMe, I contributed to migrating the robot’s navigation from ROS 1
move_base to ROS 2 Nav2, and assisted with on-robot field testing in
real-world environments.
Stack
ROS 2 · Nav2