  Human following is a crucial feature of human-robot interaction, yet it poses
numerous challenges to mobile agents in real-world scenarios. Some major
hurdles are that the target person may be in a crowd, obstructed by others, or
facing away from the agent. To tackle these challenges, we present a novel
person re-identification module composed of three parts: a 360-degree visual
registration, a neural-based person re-identification using human faces and
torsos, and a motion tracker that records and predicts the target person's
future position. Our human-following system also addresses other challenges,
including identifying fast-moving targets with low latency, searching for
targets that move out of the camera's sight, collision avoidance, and
adaptively choosing different following mechanisms based on the distance
between the target person and the mobile agent. Extensive experiments show that
our proposed person re-identification module significantly enhances the
human-following feature compared to other baseline variants.
