A framework towards a socially aware Mobile Robot motion in Human-Centered dynamic environment

For a Mobile Robot to navigate in the Human-Centered environment without imposing alien like impression by its motion, it should be able to reason about various criteria ranging from clearance, environment structure, unknown objects, social conventions, proximity constraints, presence of an individual or group of peoples, etc. Also the robot should neither be over-reactive nor be simple wait and move machine. We have adapted a Voronoi diagram based approach for the analysis of local clearance and environment structure. We also propose to treat human differently from other obstacles for which the robot constructs different sets of regions around human and iteratively converges to a set of points (milestones), using social conventions, human proximity guidelines and clearance constraints to generate and modify its path smoothly. Once equipped with such capabilities, robot is able to do higher-level reasoning for dynamic and selective adaptation of social convention depending upon the environment segment. It also leads the robot to be aware about its own motion behavior.