Analysis of an adaptive strategy for equitably approaching and joining human interactions

Abstract

Since social, assistive and companion robots need to navigate within human crowds, understanding spatial social conventions while designing navigation solutions for such robots is an essential issue. This work presents analysis of an socially compliant robot motion strategy that could be employed by social robots such as humanoids, service robots or intelligent wheelchairs, for approaching and joining humans groups in interaction, and then become an equitable part of the interaction. Following our previous work that formalized the motion strategy, a detailed synthesis is presented here with experiments that validate the proposed system in the real world.