  One of the most important barriers toward a widespread use of mobile robots
in unstructured and human populated work environments is the ability to plan a
safe path. In this paper, we propose to delegate this activity to a human
operator that walks in front of the robot marking with her/his footsteps the
path to be followed. The implementation of this approach requires a high degree
of robustness in locating the specific person to be followed (the leader). We
propose a three phase approach to fulfil this goal: 1. identification and
tracking of the person in the image space, 2. sensor fusion between camera data
and laser sensors, 3. point interpolation with continuous curvature curves. The
approach is described in the paper and extensively validated with experimental
results.
