Head-Body Motion Coordination for Human Aware Robot Navigation

Abstract

Mobile robots equipped with a pan-tilt head need to use gaze direction to manifest its navigational intents for more acceptable human-robot interaction. We frame control of such gaze behavior as multi-criteria decision-making problem, and provide a solution to synchronize gaze control with robot’s navigation planner. This approach is useful in the context of robot navigation, where it may be inapt to display only a predefined gaze pattern due to the dynamic nature of the scene. By enabling two behaviors, look-at-path and glance-at-human, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a real robotic platform in a path crossing scenario. Furthermore, we discuss results of a video based user study conducted with 126 participants showing improved communication of robot’s navigational intentions with the proposed approach.

Publication
Proc. International workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR)
Date