  This paper introduces a compound vision system that enables robots to
localize people up to 15m away using a cheap camera. And, it proposes a robust
navigation stack that combines Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and a
probabilistic localization method. To test the efficacy of these systems, we
prototyped a low-cost mobile robot that we call Covy. Covy can be used for
applications such as promoting social distancing during pandemics or estimating
the density of a crowd. We evaluated Covy's performance through extensive sets
of experiments both in simulated and realistic environments. Our results show
that Covy's compound vision algorithm doubles the range of the used depth
camera, and its hybrid navigation stack is more robust than a pure DRL-based
one.
