A Human Aware Mobile Robot Motion Planner

Robot navigation in the presence of humans raises new issues for motion planning and control when the humans must be taken explicitly into account. We claim that a human aware motion planner (HAMP) must not only provide safe robot paths, but also synthesize good, socially acceptable and legible paths. This paper focuses on a motion planner that takes explicitly into account its human partners by reasoning about their accessibility, their vision field and their preferences in terms of relative human-robot placement and motions in realistic environments. This planner is part of a human-aware motion and manipulation planning and control system that we aim to develop in order to achieve motion and manipulation tasks in the presence or in synergy with humans.

I. Introduction

The introduction of robots in our daily life raises a key issue that is “added” to the “standard challenge” of autonomous robots; the presence of humans in the robot environment and the necessity to interact with them. In the factory, the robot is systematically and physically separated from the human workers. This will not be the case for future applications where the robot will be in a situation where it will have to assist humans.