5,312 research outputs found
Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people
This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of
elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly
people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new
applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses
the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and
users for which service robots are and are not suitable
Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot
© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe
Social Attention: Modeling Attention in Human Crowds
Robots that navigate through human crowds need to be able to plan safe,
efficient, and human predictable trajectories. This is a particularly
challenging problem as it requires the robot to predict future human
trajectories within a crowd where everyone implicitly cooperates with each
other to avoid collisions. Previous approaches to human trajectory prediction
have modeled the interactions between humans as a function of proximity.
However, that is not necessarily true as some people in our immediate vicinity
moving in the same direction might not be as important as other people that are
further away, but that might collide with us in the future. In this work, we
propose Social Attention, a novel trajectory prediction model that captures the
relative importance of each person when navigating in the crowd, irrespective
of their proximity. We demonstrate the performance of our method against a
state-of-the-art approach on two publicly available crowd datasets and analyze
the trained attention model to gain a better understanding of which surrounding
agents humans attend to, when navigating in a crowd
Does anyone want to talk to me? : Reflections on the use of assistance and companion robots in care homes
Held at the AISB'15 ConventionFinal Accepted Versio
Methodology and themes of human-robot interaction: a growing research field
Original article can be found at: http://www.intechweb.org/journal.php?id=3 Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Users are free to read, print, download and use the content or part of it so long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited.This article discusses challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, which is a highly inter- and multidisciplinary area. Themes that are important in current research in this lively and growing field are identified and selected work relevant to these themes is discussed.Peer reviewe
Socially aware robot navigation system in human-populated and interactive environments based on an adaptive spatial density function and space affordances
Traditionally robots are mostly known by society due to the wide use of manipulators, which are generally placed in controlled environments such as factories. However, with the advances in the area of mobile robotics, they are increasingly inserted into social contexts, i.e., in the presence of people. The adoption of socially acceptable behaviours demands a trade-off between social comfort and other metrics of efficiency. For navigation tasks, for example, humans must be differentiated from other ordinary objects in the scene. In this work, we propose a novel human-aware navigation strategy built upon the use of an adaptive spatial density function that efficiently cluster groups of people according to their spatial arrangement. Space affordances are also used for defining potential activity spaces considering the objects in the scene. The proposed function defines regions where navigation is either discouraged or forbidden. To implement a socially acceptable navigation, the navigation architecture combines a probabilistic roadmap and rapidly-exploring random tree path planners, and an adaptation of the elastic band algorithm. Trials in real and simulated environments carried out demonstrate that the use of the clustering algorithm and social rules in the navigation architecture do not hinder the navigation performance
Learning a Group-Aware Policy for Robot Navigation
Human-aware robot navigation promises a range of applications in which mobile
robots bring versatile assistance to people in common human environments. While
prior research has mostly focused on modeling pedestrians as independent,
intentional individuals, people move in groups; consequently, it is imperative
for mobile robots to respect human groups when navigating around people. This
paper explores learning group-aware navigation policies based on dynamic group
formation using deep reinforcement learning. Through simulation experiments, we
show that group-aware policies, compared to baseline policies that neglect
human groups, achieve greater robot navigation performance (e.g., fewer
collisions), minimize violation of social norms and discomfort, and reduce the
robot's movement impact on pedestrians. Our results contribute to the
development of social navigation and the integration of mobile robots into
human environments.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey
With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments,
the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human
behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future
positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key
tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance
systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We
review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different
communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on
the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We
provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We
discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further
research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR),
37 page
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