Proactive Opinion-Driven Robot Navigation around Human Movers

Abstract-- We propose, analyze, and experimentally verify a new proactive approach for robot social navigation driven by the robot's "opinion" for which way and by how much to pass human movers crossing its path. The robot forms an opinion over time according to nonlinear dynamics that depend on the robot's observations of human movers and its level of attention to these social cues. For these dynamics, it is guaranteed that when the robot's attention is greater than a critical value, deadlock in decision making is broken, and the robot rapidly forms a strong opinion, passing each human A robot using opinion-driven navigation to pass two humans. Autonomous mobile robots are increasingly being used Once the robot passes a human, its opinion with respect to for tasks in settings such as warehouses and open public that human is no longer relevant; the opinion quickly returns spaces where they will encounter human movers. In order to its neutral value, allowing the robot to continue towards to accomplish their tasks in these settings, the robots need its destination. Likewise, the robot's attention also goes to to reliably and gracefully navigate around human movers.