A framework for adapting social conventions in a mobile robot motion in human-centered environment

Interestingly in different situations, human not only plans differently for approaching, accompanying, passing by and avoiding another person, but also smoothly maintains an appropriate distance. But for a mobile robot it is not trivial at all, while also maintaining its goal. In this paper we present a generic framework of mobile robot path planning for adapting social rules at different states of execution, which apart from assuring safety, also respects the comfort and expectations of human, and convey its intention to human well in advance. In our approach for treating human explicitly robot constructs different sets of regions around human and iteratively converges to a set of points (milestones), using social rules, human proximity rules and task oriented rules to generate a smooth path. We have compared our results with the case, when robot is purely reactive.

[1]  E. Hall,et al.  The Hidden Dimension , 1970 .

[2]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  Intention is Choice with Commitment , 1990, Artif. Intell..

[3]  Y. Shiota,et al.  The mobile robot which passes a man , 1997, Proceedings 6th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Communication. RO-MAN'97 SENDAI.

[4]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Learning Metric-Topological Maps for Indoor Mobile Robot Navigation , 1998, Artif. Intell..

[5]  Charles R. Rosenberg,et al.  Interaction With Mobile Robots in Public Places , 2000 .

[6]  Yasushi Nakauchi,et al.  A Social Robot that Stands in Line , 2000, Proceedings. 2000 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2000) (Cat. No.00CH37113).

[7]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Robots With Humanoid Features in Public Places: A Case Study , 2000, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[8]  Ben J. A. Kröse,et al.  Jijo-2: An Office Robot that Communicates and Learns , 2001, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[9]  J.-P. Laumond,et al.  Move3D: A generic platform for path planning , 2001, Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning (ISATP2001). Assembly and Disassembly in the Twenty-first Century. (Cat. No.01TH8560).

[10]  Erwin Prassler,et al.  Motion coordination between a human and a mobile robot , 2002, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[11]  Wolfram Burgard,et al.  Adapting navigation strategies using motions patterns of people , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.03CH37422).

[12]  Horst-Michael Groß,et al.  Conception and realization of a multi-sensory interactive mobile office guide , 2004, 2004 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37583).

[13]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Human-robot embodied interaction in hallway settings: a pilot user study , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..

[14]  David Lee,et al.  The influence of subjects' personality traits on personal spatial zones in a human-robot interaction experiment , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..

[15]  Yehuda E. Kalay,et al.  Simulating Human Behaviour in Built Environments , 2005 .

[16]  Shin'ichi Yuta,et al.  Crowding and guiding groups of humans by teams of mobile robots , 2005, IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts, 2005..

[17]  Rachid Alami,et al.  Rackham: An Interactive Robot-Guide , 2006, ROMAN 2006 - The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[18]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Design of an Office-Guide Robot for Social Interaction Studies , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[19]  John Nicholson,et al.  Robot-assisted wayfinding for the visually impaired in structured indoor environments , 2006, Auton. Robots.

[20]  Dirk Schulz,et al.  Accompanying persons with a mobile robot using motion prediction and probabilistic roadmaps , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[21]  Reid G. Simmons,et al.  Natural person-following behavior for social robots , 2007, 2007 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[22]  Rachid Alami,et al.  A management of mutual belief for human-robot interaction , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

[23]  Hiroshi Mizoguchi,et al.  Development of attachable modules for robotizing daily items -Person following shopping cart robot- , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO).

[24]  Takayuki Kanda,et al.  How close? Model of proximity control for information-presenting robots , 2008, 2008 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[25]  Jean-Paul Laumond,et al.  On the nonholonomic nature of human locomotion , 2008, Auton. Robots.