A Flexible and Adaptive Spatial Density Model for Context-Aware Social Mapping: Towards a More Realistic Social Navigation

Social navigation is a topic with enormous interest in autonomous robotics. Robots are gradually being used in human environments, working individually or collaborating with humans in their daily tasks. Robots in these scenarios have to be able to behave in a socially acceptable way and, for this reason, the way in which robots move has to adapt to humans and context. Proxemics has been extensively studied with the aim of improving social navigation. However, these works do not take into account that, in several situations, the personal space of the humans depends on the context (e.g., this human space is not the same in a narrow corridor than in a wide room). This work proposes the definition of an adaptive and flexible space density function that allows, on the one hand, to describe the comfort space of individuals during an interaction and, on the other hand, dynamically adapt its value in terms of the space that surrounds this interaction. In order to validate the performance, this article describes a set of simulated experiments where the robustness and improvements of the approach are tested in different environments.