A framework towards a socially aware Mobile Robot motion in Human-Centered dynamic environment

For a Mobile Robot to navigate in the Human-Centered environment without providing human with an alien like impression by its motion, it should be able to reason about various criteria ranging from clearance, environment structure, unknown objects, social conventions, proximity constraints, presence of a person as well as human groups etc. A human friendly Robot should neither be over-reactive nor be simple wait and move machine. In this paper we provide different mechanism to facilitate robot for analyzing various criteria associated with decision making process of path planning and a framework for their integration which leads to a 'better' path. For the analysis of local clearance and environment structure, a Voronoi diagram based approach is proposed. Then different set of rules are integrated to treat human and other unknown obstacles differently. In our approach for treating human explicitly robot constructs different sets of regions around human and iteratively converges to a set of points (milestones), using social conventions, human proximity guidelines and clearance constraints to generate a smooth path. Once equipped with such capabilities, our robot is able to do higher level reasoning for dynamically deciding about adapting or ignoring a social convention in a particular segment of the environment. This will lead the robot to be aware about its own behavior related to its motion