Assessing the Social Criteria for Human-Robot Collaborative Navigation: A Comparison of Human-Aware Navigation Planners

International audienceThis paper focuses on requirements for effective human robot collaboration in interactive navigation scenarios. We designed several use-cases where humans and robot had to move in the same environment that resemble canonical path-crossing situations. These use-cases include open as well as constrained spaces. Three different state-of-the-art human-aware navigation planners were used for planning the robot paths during all selected use-cases. We compare results of simulation experiments with these human-aware planners in terms of quality of generated trajectories together with discussion on capabilities and limitations of the planners. The results show that the human-robot collaborative planner performs better in everyday path-crossing configurations. This suggests that the criteria used by the human-robot collaborative planner (safety, time-to-collision, directional-costs) are possible good measures for designing acceptable human-aware navigation planners. Consequently, we analyze the effects of these social criteria and draw perspectives on future evolution of human-aware navigation planning methods