Human-Aware Navigation

Robot path planning has traditionally concentrated on collision-free paths. For robots that collaborate closely with humans, however, the situation is different in two respects: 1) the humans in the robot's environment are not randomly moving objects, but cognitive beings who can deliberately make way for a robot to pass and 2) the quality of a navigation plan depends less on quantitative efficiency criteria, but rather on the acceptance of humans. We work on a robot navigation approach that takes into account human-centered requirements and the collaborative nature of the interaction between the human and the robot.

In collaboration with LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse we have extended the Human-aware Navigation Planner for dynamic situations. A study on human navigation conducted by the group of Sensorimotor Research of LMU Munich showed that humans seem not to use optimization strategies and that their behavior differs largely from that of robots using the classical split of global and local planning.

Currently we develop a heuristic approach to navigation to account for the inherent dynamic nature of the navigation task in human environments.

Publications

Evaluating directional cost models in navigation (Thibault Kruse, Alexandra Kirsch, Rachid Alami, Harmish Khambaitha), In ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2014. [pdf]

Human-aware robot navigation: A survey (Thibault Kruse, Amit Kumar Pandey, Rachid Alami, Alexandra Kirsch), In Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2013. [pdf]

Strategies of locomotor collision avoidance (Patrizia Basili, Murat Saglam, Thibault Kruse, Markus Huber, Alexandra Kirsch, Stefan Glasauer), In Gait & Posture, 2013, volume 37, p. 385-390. [pdf]

Legible Robot Navigation in the Proximity of Moving Humans (Thibault Kruse, Patrizia Basili, Stefan Glasauer, Alexandra Kirsch), In IEEE workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts, 2012. [pdf]

Exploiting Human Cooperation in Human-Centered Robot Navigation (Thibault Kruse, Alexandra Kirsch, E. Akin Sisbot, Rachid Alami), In IEEE International Symposium in Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Ro-Man), 2010. [pdf]

Dynamic Generation and Execution of Human Aware Navigation Plans (Thibault Kruse, Alexandra Kirsch, E. Akin Sisbot, Rachid Alami), In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2010. [pdf]