  Personal robots are expected to interact with the user by recognizing the
user's face. However, in most of the service robot applications, the user needs
to move himself/herself to allow the robot to see him/her face to face. To
overcome such limitations, a method for estimating human body orientation is
required. Previous studies used various components such as feature extractors
and classification models to classify the orientation which resulted in low
performance. For a more robust and accurate approach, we propose the light
weight convolutional neural networks, an end to end system, for estimating
human body orientation. Our body orientation estimation model achieved 81.58%
and 94% accuracy with the benchmark dataset and our own dataset respectively.
The proposed method can be used in a wide range of service robot applications
which depend on the ability to estimate human body orientation. To show its
usefulness in service robot applications, we designed a simple robot
application which allows the robot to move towards the user's frontal plane.
With this, we demonstrated an improved face detection rate.
