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Viewing Robot Navigation in Human Environment as a Cooperative Activity

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Robotics Research

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 10))

Abstract

We claim that navigation in human environments can be viewed as cooperative activity especially in constrained situations. Humans concurrently aid and comply with each other while moving in a shared space. Cooperation helps pedestrians to efficiently reach their own goals and respect conventions such as the personal space of others. To meet human comparable efficiency, a robot needs to predict the human trajectories and plan its own trajectory correspondingly in the same shared space. In this work, we present a navigation planner that is able to plan such cooperative trajectories, simultaneously enforcing the robot’s kinematic constraints and avoiding other non-human dynamic obstacles. Using robust social constraints of projected time to a possible future collision, compatibility of human-robot motion direction, and proxemics, our planner is able to replicate human-like navigation behavior not only in open spaces but also in confined areas. Besides adapting the robot trajectory, the planner is also able to proactively propose co-navigation solutions by jointly computing human and robot trajectories within the same optimization framework. We demonstrate richness and performance of the cooperative planner with simulated and real world experiments on multiple interactive navigation scenarios.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/PR2.

  2. 2.

    https://www.openrobots.org/wiki/morse.

  3. 3.

    https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/pepper.

  4. 4.

    Source code for the cooperative planner is available at https://github.com/harmishhk/lateb_local_planner.

  5. 5.

    http://www.optitrack.com/.

  6. 6.

    Although the motion capture system delivers data at higher frequency (about 100 Hz), we apply a moving average filter and re-sample the filtered data at 10 Hz to have better estimate of velocities.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 688147 (MuMMER project).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LAAS-CNRS, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, Toulouse, France

    Harmish Khambhaita & Rachid Alami

Authors
  1. Harmish Khambhaita
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  2. Rachid Alami
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Harmish Khambhaita .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nancy M. Amato

  2. Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Greg Hager

  3. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Shawna Thomas

  4. Department of Electrical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Miguel Torres-Torriti

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Khambhaita, H., Alami, R. (2020). Viewing Robot Navigation in Human Environment as a Cooperative Activity. In: Amato, N., Hager, G., Thomas, S., Torres-Torriti, M. (eds) Robotics Research. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28619-4_25

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