Approaching a person in a socially acceptable manner using a fast marching planner

Abstract

In real world scenarios for mobile robots, socially acceptable navigation is a key component to interact naturally with other persons. On the one hand this enables a robot to behave more human-like, and on the other hand it increases the acceptance of the user towards the robot as an interaction partner. As part of this research field, we present in this paper a strategy of approaching a person in a socially acceptable manner. Therefore, we use the theory of "personal space" and present a method of modeling this space to enable a mobile robot to approach a person from the front. We use a standard Dynamic Window Approach to control the robot motion and, since the personal space model could not be used directly, a Fast Marching planner is used to plan an optimal path to approach the person. Additionally, we give a proof of concept with first preliminary experiments. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.