Social mapping of human-populated environments by implicit function learning

With robots technology shifting towards entering human populated environments, the need for augmented perceptual and planning robotic skills emerges that complement to human presence. In this integration, perception and adaptation to the implicit human social conventions plays a fundamental role. Toward this goal, we propose a novel framework that can model context-dependent human spatial interactions, encoded in the form of a social map. The core idea of our approach resides in modelling human personal spaces as non-linearly scaled probability functions within the robotic state space and devise the structure and shape of a social map by solving a learning problem in kernel space. The social borders are subsequently obtained as isocontours of the learned implicit function that can realistically model arbitrarily complex social interactions of varying shape and size. We present our experiments using a rich dataset of human interactions, demonstrating the feasibility and utility of the proposed approach and promoting its application to social mapping of human-populated environments.