Understanding socially aware robot navigation

Navigation is an essential skill for autonomous robots, and it becomes a cumbersome task in human populated environments. Robots need to perform the tasks without disturbing the humans around them and ensure comfort and safety of humans as well. It is further influenced by various factors like social norms, geometry of environment, and surrounding people. It is essential to comprehend three components, i.e., social conventions (SC), human motion (HM), and context aware mapping (CAM), for establishing effective socially aware robot navigation (SARN). This article discusses these different aspects of these components, which should be taken into consideration while designing an efficient and optimal SARN. Further, it reports recent experiments conducted by different institutes pertaining to these components.