Proactive Opinion-Driven Robot Navigation Around Human Movers

Charlotte Cathcart, Maria Santos, Shinkyu Park, Naomi Ehrich Leonard

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose, analyze, and experimentally verify a new proactive approach for robot social navigation driven by the robot's 'opinion' for which way and by how much to pass human movers crossing its path. The robot forms an opinion over time according to nonlinear dynamics that depend on the robot's observations of human movers and its level of attention to these social cues. For these dynamics, it is guaranteed that when the robot's attention is greater than a critical value, deadlock in decision making is broken, and the robot rapidly forms a strong opinion, passing each human mover even if the robot has no bias nor evidence for which way to pass. We enable proactive rapid and reliable social navigation by having the robot grow its attention across the critical value when a human mover approaches. With human-robot experiments we demonstrate the flexibility of our approach and validate our analytical results on deadlock-breaking. We also show that a single design parameter can tune the trade-off between efficiency and reliability in human-robot passing. The new approach has the additional advantage that it does not rely on a predictive model of human behavior.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2023
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages4052-4058
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781665491907
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2023 - Detroit, United States
Duration: Oct 1 2023Oct 5 2023

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
ISSN (Print)2153-0858
ISSN (Electronic)2153-0866

Conference

Conference2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityDetroit
Period10/1/2310/5/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Science Applications

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