Aerial social force model: A new framework to accompany people using autonomous flying robots

In this paper, we propose a novel Aerial Social Force Model (ASFM) that allows autonomous flying robots to accompany humans in urban environments in a safe and comfortable manner. To date, we are not aware of other state-of-the-art method that accomplish this task. The proposed approach is a 3D version of the Social Force Model (SFM) for the field of aerial robots which includes an interactive human-robot navigation scheme capable of predicting human motions and intentions so as to safely accompany them to their final destination. ASFM also introduces a new metric to fine-tune the parameters of the force model, and to evaluate the performance of the aerial robot companion based on comfort and distance between the robot and humans. The presented approach is extensively validated in diverse simulations and real experiments, and compared against other similar works in the literature. ASFM attains remarkable results and shows that it is a valuable framework for social robotics applications, such as guiding people or human-robot interaction.