Enhancing robot reliability for health-care facilities by means of Human-Aware Navigation Planning

TL;DR

This paper presents a human-aware navigation system for healthcare robots, integrating it into a ROS-based platform and validating its effectiveness through simulations and expert feedback to improve safety and acceptability.

Contribution

The work introduces a Co-operative Human-Aware Navigation planner integrated into a healthcare robot, tested extensively in simulated medical scenarios for improved reliability.

Findings

Enhanced navigation reliability in healthcare scenarios

Positive validation from medical experts

Identification of system limitations and performance issues

Abstract

With the aim of enabling robots to cooperate with humans, carry out human-like tasks, or navigate among humans, we need to ensure that they are equipped with the ability to comprehend human behaviors and use the extracted knowledge for intelligent decision-making. This ability is particularly important in the safety-critical and human-centred environment of health-care institutions. In the field of robotic navigation, the most cutting-edge approaches to enhancing robot reliability in the application domain of healthcare facilities and in general pertain to augmenting navigation systems with human-aware properties. To implement this in our work, the Co-operative Human-Aware Navigation planner has been integrated into the ROS-based differential-drive robot MARRtina and exhaustively challenged within various simulated contexts and scenarios (mainly modelling the situations relevant in the medical domain) to draw attention to the integrated system's benefits and identify its drawbacks or instances of poor performance while exploring the scope of system capabilities and creating a full characterization of its applicability. The simulation results are then presented to medical experts, and the enhanced robot acceptability within the domain is validated with them as the robot is further planned for deployment.