Socially-Aware Opinion-Based Navigation with Oval Limit Cycles

TL;DR

This paper presents a holistic approach to socially-aware robot navigation by combining opinion dynamics and vortex fields, enabling robots to reach consensus and generate socially acceptable trajectories more effectively.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integration of opinion dynamics with vortex fields for improved socially-aware navigation, outperforming isolated methods.

Findings

Combined approach achieves better social acceptance in navigation.

Outperforms existing methods in simulation tests.

Enhances robot-human interaction safety.

Abstract

When humans move in a shared space, they choose navigation strategies that preserve their mutual safety. At the same time, each human seeks to minimise the number of modifications to her/his path. In order to achieve this result, humans use unwritten rules and reach a consensus on their decisions about the motion direction by exchanging non-verbal messages. They then implement their choice in a mutually acceptable way. Socially-aware navigation denotes a research effort aimed at replicating this logic inside robots. Existing results focus either on how robots can participate in negotiations with humans, or on how they can move in a socially acceptable way. We propose a holistic approach in which the two aspects are jointly considered. Specifically, we show that by combining opinion dynamics (to reach a consensus) with vortex fields (to generate socially acceptable trajectories), the result outperforms the application of the two techniques in isolation.