Publication

People's V-formation and side-by-side model adapted to accompany groups of people by social robots

Conference Article

Conference

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

Edition

2019

Pages

202-2088

Doc link

https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968601

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

This paper presents a new method to allow robots to accompany a person or a group of people imitating pedestrians behavior. Two-people groups usually walk in a side-by-side formation and three-people groups walk in a V-formation so that they can see each other. For this reason, the proposed method combines a Side-by-side and V-formation pedestrian model with the Anticipative Kinodynamic Planner (AKP). Combining these methods, the robot is able to do an anticipatory accompaniment of groups of humans, as well as to avoid static and dynamic obstacles in advance, while keeping the prescribed formations. The proposed framework allows also a dynamical re-positioning of the robot, if the physical position of the partners change in the group formation. Furthermore, people have a randomness factor that the robot has to manage, for that reason, the system was adapted to deal with changes in people's velocity, orientation and occlusions. Finally, the method has been validated using synthetic experiments and real-life experiments with our Tibi robot. In addition, a user study has been realized to reveal the social acceptability of the method.

Categories

humanoid robots, mobile robots, social aspects of automation.

Author keywords

Human-Robot group companion, V-formation group, Robot Navigation, Human-Robot Interaction, Human-Robot Collaboration.

Scientific reference

E. Repiso, F. Zanlungo, T. Kanda, A. Garrell Zulueta and A. Sanfeliu. People's V-formation and side-by-side model adapted to accompany groups of people by social robots, 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2019, Macau, China, pp. 202-2088.