7,976 research outputs found
Modeling Cooperative Navigation in Dense Human Crowds
For robots to be a part of our daily life, they need to be able to navigate
among crowds not only safely but also in a socially compliant fashion. This is
a challenging problem because humans tend to navigate by implicitly cooperating
with one another to avoid collisions, while heading toward their respective
destinations. Previous approaches have used hand-crafted functions based on
proximity to model human-human and human-robot interactions. However, these
approaches can only model simple interactions and fail to generalize for
complex crowded settings. In this paper, we develop an approach that models the
joint distribution over future trajectories of all interacting agents in the
crowd, through a local interaction model that we train using real human
trajectory data. The interaction model infers the velocity of each agent based
on the spatial orientation of other agents in his vicinity. During prediction,
our approach infers the goal of the agent from its past trajectory and uses the
learned model to predict its future trajectory. We demonstrate the performance
of our method against a state-of-the-art approach on a public dataset and show
that our model outperforms when predicting future trajectories for longer
horizons.Comment: Accepted at ICRA 201
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
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