Navigation Among Humans

As robot are starting to emerge in human everyday environments, it becomes necessary to find ways, in which they can interact and engage seamlessly in the human environments. Open-ended human environments, such as pedestrian streets, shopping centres, hospital corridors, airports etc., are places where robots will start to emerge. Hence, being able to plan motion in these dynamic environments is an important skill for future generations of robots. To be accepted in our everyday human environments, the robots must be able to move naturally, and such that it is both safe, natural and comfortable for the humans in the environment. Imagine a service robot driving around in an airport. The objective of the service robot is: to drive around among the people in the environment; identify people who need assistance; approach them in an appropriate way; interact with the person to help with the needs of the person. This could be showing the way to a gate, providing departure information, checking reservations, giving information about local transportation, etc. This chapter describes algorithms that handle the motion and navigation related problems of this scenario. To enable robots with capabilities for safe and natural motion in human environments like in the above described scenario, there are a number of abilities that the robot must possess. First the robot must be able to sense and find the position of the people in the environment. Also, it is necessary to obtain information about orientation and velocity of each person. Then the robot must be able to find out if a person needs assistance, i.e. the robot needs to establish the intentions of the people. Knowing the motion state and the intention state of the person, this can be used to generate motion, which is adapted according to the person and the situation. But in a crowded human environment, it is not only necessary for the robot to be able to move safe and naturally around one person, but also able to navigate through the environment from one place to another. So in brief, the robot must be able to:

[1]  Illah R. Nourbakhsh,et al.  The role of expressiveness and attention in human-robot interaction , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[2]  R. Simmons,et al.  COMPANION: A Constraint-Optimizing Method for Person-Acceptable Navigation , 2009, RO-MAN 2009 - The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[3]  Odest Chadwicke Jenkins,et al.  Recognizing Human Pose and Actions for Interactive Robots , 2007 .

[4]  Anthony Stentz,et al.  Anytime RRTs , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[5]  Marek P. Michalowski,et al.  A spatial model of engagement for a social robot , 2006, 9th IEEE International Workshop on Advanced Motion Control, 2006..

[6]  Thomas Bak,et al.  Pose estimation and adaptive robot behaviour for human-robot interaction , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[7]  Thomas Bak,et al.  Pilot Study of Person Robot Interaction in a Public Transit Space , 2008, Eurobot Conference.

[8]  Christian Heath,et al.  IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication , 2009 .

[9]  António E. Ruano,et al.  Fast Line, Arc/Circle and Leg Detection from Laser Scan Data in a Player Driver , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Zbigniew Michalewicz,et al.  Path Planning in Dynamic Environments , 2005, Innovations in Robot Mobility and Control.

[11]  David Lee,et al.  Close encounters: spatial distances between people and a robot of mechanistic appearance , 2005, 5th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2005..

[12]  Nidhi Kalra,et al.  Replanning with RRTs , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[13]  Universityof SouthernCalifornia LosAngeles.  Laser-based People Tracking , 2002 .

[14]  Naohiko Hanajima,et al.  Investigation of impressions for approach motion of a mobile robot based on psychophysiological analysis , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..

[15]  Maja J. Mataric,et al.  A multi-modal approach to selective interaction in assistive domains , 2005, ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005..

[16]  Dragomir Anguelov,et al.  Object Pose Detection in Range Scan Data , 2006, 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR'06).

[17]  Leila Takayama,et al.  Influences on proxemic behaviors in human-robot interaction , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[18]  Bogdan Raducanu,et al.  Detecting and tracking of 3D face pose for human-robot interaction , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[19]  Russell J. Clark,et al.  Case-Based Reactive Navigation: A Cased Based Method for On-Line Selection and Adaptation of Reactive Control Parameters in Autonomous Robotics Systems , 1992 .

[20]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Embodied social interaction for robots , 2005 .

[21]  Rafael Muñoz-Salinas,et al.  People Detection and Tracking Through Stereo Vision for Human-Robot Interaction , 2005, MICAI.

[22]  Thomas Bak,et al.  Adaptive human aware navigation based on motion pattern analysis , 2009, RO-MAN 2009 - The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[23]  Geoffrey J. Gordon,et al.  Better Motion Prediction for People-tracking , 2004 .

[24]  Alexei Makarenko,et al.  Randomised MPC-based motion-planning for mobile robot obstacle avoidance , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[25]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  Planning algorithms , 2006 .

[26]  Edward T. Hall,et al.  A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior1 , 1963 .

[27]  M. Kleinehagenbrock,et al.  Person tracking with a mobile robot based on multi-modal anchoring , 2002, Proceedings. 11th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[28]  Igor Jurisica,et al.  Applying Case-Based Reasoning to Control in Robotics , 1995 .

[29]  Takayuki Kanda,et al.  Navigation for human-robot interaction tasks , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

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

[31]  Grzegorz Cielniak,et al.  Quantitative performance evaluation of a people tracking system on a mobile robot , 2005 .

[32]  Monica N. Nicolescu,et al.  Understanding human intentions via Hidden Markov Models in autonomous mobile robots , 2008, 2008 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

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

[34]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  Methodological Issues in HRI: A Comparison of Live and Video-Based Methods in Robot to Human Approach Direction Trials , 2006, ROMAN 2006 - The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[35]  Steven M. LaValle,et al.  Randomized Kinodynamic Planning , 1999, Proceedings 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.99CH36288C).

[36]  Russell J. Clark,et al.  Case-based reactive navigation: a method for on-line selection and adaptation of reactive robotic control parameters , 1997, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B.

[37]  Rachid Alami,et al.  How may I serve you?: a robot companion approaching a seated person in a helping context , 2006, HRI '06.

[38]  Mathias Fontmarty,et al.  Implementing a Human-Aware Robot System , 2006, ROMAN 2006 - The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[39]  Thomas Bak,et al.  Trajectory planning for robots in dynamic human environments , 2010, 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[40]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  Spatio-temporal case-based reasoning for behavioral selection , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[41]  Rachid Alami,et al.  Navigation in the presence of humans , 2005, 5th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2005..

[42]  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..

[43]  James J. Kuffner,et al.  Multipartite RRTs for Rapid Replanning in Dynamic Environments , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[44]  Dizan Vasquez,et al.  Incremental Learning for Motion Prediction of Pedestrians and Vehicles , 2007, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics.