Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
socially-compliant navigation
human-robot interaction
personal space
mobile delivery robot
reaction distance
Look Further: Socially-Compliant Navigation System in Residential Buildings
🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a long-range social navigation system that extends social responsiveness beyond 8 meters, addressing the limitation of traditional approaches which react only within a few meters and thus fail to optimize human perception of the robot’s overall motion. The system introduces a Proactive Lane Change (PLC) strategy that anticipates interactions in corridor environments by adjusting the robot’s lateral position well in advance. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to conventional methods relying on deceleration or stopping, the proposed approach significantly enhances users’ perceptions of the robot’s safety, motion fluency, and politeness. However, no notable improvement was observed in blind-corner intersection scenarios, suggesting contextual limitations of the strategy.
📝 Abstract
The distance at which a mobile robot reacts to a person strongly impacts various qualities of the human-robot interaction. In this paper, we focus on the navigation of a mobile delivery robot platform in a residential indoor hallway environment. Social navigation methods typically focus on avoiding uncomfortable human-robot interactions, such as when a robot encroaches on someone's personal space. Since personal space has been shown to be in the range of just a few meters, social navigation methods typically focus on deconflicting and resolving these short-range interactions. In this work, however, we demonstrate that by extending the reaction distance to over eight meters, far beyond the typical interaction distance, we can improve the human's perception of the robot's motion. We introduce the Proactive Lane-Changing (PLC) motion pattern and a navigation system that leverages it to react to people at an increased distance. This pattern consists of changing the robot's lateral position as it navigates down the hallway from the center to the side at an eight-meter distance from an oncoming person.
We conducted a user study with 42 participants to assess their impressions of the delivery robot based on three service objectives: safety, smoothness, and politeness. In the straight hallway scenario (Frontal Approach), results showed significant improvement in each of these three objectives compared to typical motion patterns found in the literature: slowing down, stopping, and reactive collision avoidance in the proximity of a person. In contrast, in the intersection (Blind Corner) scenarios, none of the approaches performed significantly better than any other, with participants having a diverse range of preferences among robot motion patterns.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Proactive Lane-Changing
socially-compliant navigation
long-range human-robot interaction
mobile delivery robot
reactive distance extension
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