Head-Body Motion Coordination for Human Aware Robot Navigation

Harmish Khambhaita (1) , Jorge Rios-Martinez (2) , Rachid Alami (1)

1 LAAS-RIS - Équipe Robotique et InteractionS
2 Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán

Mobile robots equipped with a pan-tilt head need to use gaze direction to manifest its navigational intents for more acceptable human-robot interaction. We frame control of such gaze behavior as multi-criteria decision-making problem, and provide a solution to synchronize gaze control with robot's navigation planner. This approach is useful in the context of robot navigation, where it may be inapt to display only a predefined gaze pattern due to the dynamic nature of the scene. By enabling two behaviors, look-at-path and glance-at-human, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a real robotic platform in a path crossing scenario. Furthermore, we discuss results of a video based user study conducted with 126 participants showing improved communication of robot's navigational intentions with the proposed approach.

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Harmish Khambhaita, Jorge Rios-Martinez, Rachid Alami. Head-Body Motion Coordination for Human Aware Robot Navigation. 9th International workshop on Human-Friendlly Robotics (HFR 2016), Sep 2016, Gênes, Italy. 8p. ⟨hal-01568838⟩