Socially-Aware Robot Navigation: A Learning Approach

The ability to act in a socially-aware way is a key skill for robots that share a space with humans. In this paper we address the problem of socially-aware navigation among people that meets objective criteria such as travel time or path length as well as subjective criteria such as social comfort. Opposed to model based approaches typically taken in related work, we pose the problem as an unsupervised learning problem. We learn a set of dynamic motion prototypes from observations of relative motion behavior of humans found in publicly available surveillance data sets. The learned motion prototypes are then used to compute dynamic cost maps for path planning using an any-angle A* algorithm. In the evaluation we demonstrate that the learned behaviors are better in reproducing human relative motion in both criteria than a Proxemics-based baseline method.