This study addresses the challenge of integrating social norms into robot navigation, which is essential for ensuring that robots operate safely and efficiently in human-centric environments. Social norms, often unspoken and implicitly understood among people, are difficult to explicitly define and implement in robotic systems. To overcome this, we derive these norms from real human trajectory data, utilizing the comprehensive ATC dataset to identify the minimum social zones humans and robots must respect. These zones are integrated into the robot' navigation system by applying barrier functions, ensuring the robot consistently remains within the designated safety set. Simulation results demonstrate that our system effectively mimics human-like navigation strategies, such as passing on the right side and adjusting speed or pausing in constrained spaces. The proposed framework is versatile, easily comprehensible, and tunable, demonstrating the potential to advance the development of robots designed to navigate effectively in human-centric environments.

London, Dec 24 (IANS) In a bid a to teach robots how to respect personal space, scientists are now giving mobile robots a crash course in avoiding collisions with humans. Using "impedance" control, the researchers at the Institute of Automatics of the National University of San Juan in Argentina aimed to regulate the social dynamics between the robot's movements and the interactions of the robot's environment. The team did this by first analysing how a human leader and a human follower interact on a set track with well-defined borders. The feedback humans use to adjust their behaviours - letting someone know they're following too closely, for example - was marked as social forces and treated as defined physical fields. When a robot follows a human as part of a formation, it is supposed that it must also respect these social zones to improve its social acceptance," wrote Daniel Herrera, and an author on the study.

WASHINGTON: Scientists are teaching mobile robots how to respect the personal space of humans beings and avoid collisions with them. "When a robot follows a human as part of a formation, it is supposed that it must also respect these social zones to improve its social acceptance," said Herrera. Using impedance control, researchers aimed to regulate the social dynamics between the robot's movements and the interactions of the robot's environment. They did this by first analysing how a human leader and a human follower interact on a set track with well-defined borders. The feedback humans use to adjust their behaviors - letting someone know they're following too closely, for example - was marked as social forces and treated as defined physical fields.