This paper presents a new framework for how autonomous social robots approach and accompany people in urban environments. The method discussed allows the robot to accompany a person and approach to other one, by adapting its own navigation in anticipation of future interactions with other people or contact with static obstacles. The contributions of the paper are manifold: firstly, we extended the Social Force model and the Anticipative Kinodynamic Planner (Ferrer and Sanfeliu, in: IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems. IEEE, 2014) to the case of an adaptive side-by-side navigation; secondly, we enhance side-by-side navigation with an approaching task and a final positioning that allows the robot to interact with both people; and finally, we use findings from experiments of real-life observations of people walking in pairs to define the parameters of the human–robot interaction in our case of adaptive side-by-side. The method was validated by a large set of simulations; we also conducted real-life experiments with our robot, Tibi, to validate the framework described for the interaction process. In addition, we carried out various surveys and user studies to indicate the social acceptability of the robots performance of the accompanying, approaching and positioning tasks.

Work supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under project ColRobTransp (DPI2016-78957-R. AEI/FEDER EU), by the Spanish State Research Agency through the Maria de Maeztu Seal of Excellence to IRI (MDM-2016-0656) and EU TERRINET project (H2020-INFRAIA-2017-1-two-stage-730994). Ely Repiso is also supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under a FPI-grant (BES-2014-067713).

Peer reviewed