Socially aware robot navigation system in human interactive environments

In social environments, humans mostly stay in social interactive groups with their daily activities. A mobile service robot must be aware of not only human individuals but also social interactive groups, and then behave safely and socially (politely and, respectively) in human interactive environments. In this paper, we propose a social reactive control (SRC) that enables a mobile service robot to navigate safely and socially in the human interactive environments. The SRC is derived by incorporating both states of individuals (position, orientation, motion, and human field of view) and social interactive groups (group’s types, group’s centre, group’s radius, and group’s velocity) into the conventional social force model . The SRC can be combined with a conventional path planning technique to generate a socially aware robot navigation system that is capable of controlling mobile service robots to traverse with socially acceptable behaviours. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed social reactive control through a series of real-world experiments.