Rémi Paulin - Human-Robot Motion: an Attention-Based Approach

For autonomous mobile robots designed to share their environment with humans, path safety and efficiency are not the only aspects guiding their motion: they must follow social rules so as not to cause discomfort to surrounding people. Most socially-aware path planners rely heavily on the concept of social spaces; however, social spaces are hard to model and they are of limited use in the context of human-robot interaction where intrusion into social spaces is necessary. In this work, a new approach for socially-aware path planning is presented that performs well in complex environments as well as in the context of human-robot interaction. Specifically, the concept of attention is used to model how the influence of the environment as a whole affects how the robot’s motion is perceived by people within close proximity. A new computational model of attention is presented that estimates how our attentional resources are shared amongst the salient elements in our environment. Based on this model, the novel concept of attention field is introduced and a path planner that relies on this field is developed in order to produce socially acceptable paths. To do so, a state-of-the-art many-objective optimization algorithm is successfully applied to the path planning problem. The capacities of the proposed approach are illustrated in several case studies where the robot is assigned different tasks. Firstly, when the task is to navigate in the environment without causing distraction our approach produces promising results even in complex situations. Secondly, when the task is to attract a person’s attention in view of interacting with him or her, the motion planner is able to automatically choose a destination that best conveys its desire to interact whilst keeping the motion safe efficient and socially acceptable.