Social behaviors are crucial to improve the acceptance of a robot in human-shared environments. One of themost important social cues is undoubtedly the social space. This human mechanism acts like a repulsive field to guaranteecomfortable interactions. Its modeling has been widely studied in social robotics, but its experimental inference has beenweakly mentioned. Thereby, this paper proposes a novel algorithm to infer the dimensions of an elliptical social zone froma points-cloud around the robot. The approach consists of identifying how the humans avoid a robot during navigationin shared scenarios, and later use this experience to represent humans obstacles like elliptical potential fields with thepreviously identified dimensions. Thus, the algorithm starts with a first-learning stage where the robot navigates withoutavoiding humans, i.e. the humans are in charge of avoiding the robots while developing their tasks. During this period,the robot generates a points-cloud with 2D laser measures from its own framework to define the human-presence zonesaround itself but prioritizing its closest surroundings. Later, the inferred social zone is incorporated to a null-space-based(NSB) control for a non-holonomic mobile robot, which consists of both trajectory tracking and pedestrian collisionavoidance. Finally, the performance of the learning algorithm and the motion control is verified through experimentation.
Analysis on Motion Control Based on Reaction Null Space for Ground Grip Robot on an Asteroid
