Impact of decision-making system in social navigation

Facing human activity-aware navigation with a cognitive architecture raises several difficulties integrating the components and orchestrating behaviors and skills to perform social tasks. In a real-world scenario, the navigation system should not only consider individuals like obstacles. It is necessary to offer particular and dynamic people representation to enhance the HRI experience. The robot’s behaviors must be modified by humans, directly or indirectly. In this paper, we integrate our human representation framework in a cognitive architecture to allow that people who interact with the robot could modify its behavior, not only with the interaction but also with their culture or the social context. The human representation framework represents and distributes the proxemic zones’ information in a standard way, through a cost map. We have evaluated the influence of the decision-making system in human-aware navigation and how a local planner may be decisive in this navigation. The material developed during this research can be found in a public repository (https://github.com/IntelligentRoboticsLabs/social_navigation2_WAF) and instructions to facilitate the reproducibility of the results.

Navigating post-prison life. Social positioning and agency in unstable circumstances

People that are released from prison experience 'life outside' as unpredictable and insecure. They are faced with stigmatization, poverty and feelings of alienation from the 'world outside.' Based on ethnographic research in the field of post-prison life, this paper asks how formerly incarcerated men act and position themselves within and around uncertain circumstances that characterize post-prison life. The paper introduces the concept of 'social navigation' as an epistemological tool for approaching post-prison life ethnographically. In doing so, it shows the potential of the concept of social navigation in understanding actor's social positioning and agency within unstable sociocultural landscapes and within a disrupted sociocultural order.

‘Having money is not the essential thing . . . but . . . it gets everything moving’: Young Colombians Navigating Towards Uncertain Futures?

In this article, I extend the discussion of aspirations as a conceptual tool by exploring how young Colombians plan to pursue them and by seeking to understand their aspirations as a way of navigating towards what they see as a good life. Drawing upon insights from fieldwork, I use Vigh’s concept of social navigation to emphasise the importance of the social environment, and the available opportunity structures and resources, which shape young people’s aspirations and their ideas of a good life but which, more importantly, influence their navigational strategies to pursue them. I argue that Colombian young people from poor backgrounds do have aspirations and that these go beyond educational and occupational goals. Their aspirations provide information about their desire for a more stable future in an uncertain world but do not necessarily match the opportunities available to them. The young Cartagenians featuring in this study, therefore, struggle to overcome contextual and structural constraints in their social navigation, which is aimed at achieving a good life. I conclude that the young people featured in this study live amid uncertainty about their future and follow a form of doxa in formulating their aspirations. However, while the combination of economic constraints and doxic aspirations that are usually unachievable create barriers to their imagined futures, the young people socially navigate according to the opportunities that emerge and become available to them, to achieve a form of what they perceive as a good life, whereby educational and occupational goals became a means to an end.