Social Cues in the Autonomous Navigation of Indoor Mobile Robots
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Social Cues in the Autonomous Navigation of Indoor Mobile Robots Arun Kumar Reddy1 · Vaibhav Malviya1
· Rahul Kala1
Accepted: 26 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Robots are now operating in workspaces occupied by humans and the robots often need to avoid people while travelling to their desired goal. Humans follow some navigation conventions while walking, called as social cues, like avoiding an oncoming person from the left. It is important for the robots to display the same social cues to be socially accepted by the humans. Current works in social robot motion planning are limited to maintenance of a socially compliant distance. This paper exhibits a socialistic behavior of a robot avoiding an oncoming human by the preferred side. This paper extends the social force model to incorporate the social cues by adding new social forces. The paper also extends the geometric approach to incorporate the social cues by selecting the geometric gap as per the social preference. Finally, we propose a novel hybrid approach combining the social potential field and geometric method, wherein the preferred gap for navigation adds a new social force to the robot. The proposed approach maintains the proactive nature of the geometric approach as well as retains the reactive nature of the social force model. The hybrid method maintains a larger clearance and generates safer trajectories as compared to the baseline social potential field and follow the gap methods. The experiments are done with the Pioneer LX robot using vision cameras and a lidar for navigation operating at the Centre of Intelligent Robotics at IIIT Allahabad. Keywords Social robot motion planning · Social potential field · Geometric motion planning · Social robotics
1 Introduction Due to advancements in robotic technologies in the recent years, there has been a lot of research in the area of social robotics [1, 2], where the robots work alongside humans. Such services include room service, luggage carrying services in areas such as malls, railway stations and airports [3–5]. These tasks are very complex because the human behaviors are unpredictable.
1.1 Social Cues The humans usually follow a few subtle behaviors known as social cues for easy navigation in crowded environments. Social cues are usually non-verbal hints that can be used to
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Vaibhav Malviya [email protected] Arun Kumar Reddy [email protected] Rahul Kala [email protected]
1
Centre of Intelligent Robotics, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, Prayagraj, India
guide interactions and help to clarify people’s meanings and intentions. It is important that the robots exhibit social cues to be recognized by the humans and the social cues be like those used by the humans. While navigating an environment with many humans around, we tend to maintain a reasonable distance from the others passing by, and the robots must do the same [6, 7]. It has been widely observed that the humans follow simple navigation rules to avoid colliding with each other such as passi
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