Human-Aware Navigation in Crowded Environments Using Adaptive Proxemic Area and Group Detection

Navigation is an essential task for social robots. However, certain rules must be followed to allow them to move without causing distraction or discomfort to people. Considering that the context surrounding robots and persons affects the expected behavior, this work defines a social area around a person that adapts to the real situation. In addition, the social context of a person is extended to identify groups of people, which the robot should take into account while navigating. With this understanding of the surrounding of the robot together with the ability to predict the trajectory of individuals as well as groups, the proposed solution not only effectively addresses collision avoidance while promoting socially acceptable behavior but also outperforms the majority of recent works in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, a dedicated policy is introduced to react to social navigation conflicts. The evaluation performed in a simulated environment shows that the computation of our proposed solution is at least 8 times faster than the best state-of-the-art approach while preserving comparable social conduct. Also, the results of realistic experiments performed using Gazebo and a real robot are reported.