Path planning maximising human comfort for assistive robots

Motion planning for service robots used for human assistance in complex environments is a challenging task with multifaceted requirements. On the one hand, the generated path has to avoid obstacles and satisfy the user requirements. On the other, the generated path has to be perceived as comfortable by the user. An efficient solution to this difficult problem is based on a separation of concerns between two subproblems: 1. generating a sequence of waypoints that connects the source to the destination, 2. generating a path that joins the waypoints and complies with the dynamic constraints. In this paper, we concentrate on the second problem with an explicit focus on how to account for users' comfort. The result is accomplished by solving an optimal control problem that inherently generates the smooth trajectories required by the user. The cost functions used in the optimisation problem allows to take different dimensions of the user's comfort into consideration. Our technique lends itself to an efficient numeric solution and can be easily applied to different algorithms for waypoint generation.