Design of robust robotic proxemic behaviour

Abstract

Personal robots that share the same space with humans need to be socially acceptable and effective as they interact with people. In this paper we focus our attention on the definition of a behaviour-based robotic architecture that, (1) allows the robot to navigate safely in a cluttered and dynamically changing domestic environment and (2) encodes embodied non-verbal interactions: the robot respects the user's personal space by choosing the appropriate distance and direction of approach. The model of the personal space is derived from a human-robot psycho-physical study and it is described in a convenient mathematical form. The robot's target location is dynamically inferred through the solution of a Bayesian filtering problem. The validation of the overall behavioural architecture shows that the robot is able to exhibit appropriate proxemic behaviour. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.