Abstract-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 humanaware motion planner 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.

With robotics hardware becoming more and more safe and compliant, robots are not far from entering our homes. The robot, that will share the same environment with humans, will be expected to consider the geometry of the interaction and to perform intelligent space sharing.In this case, even the simplest tasks, e.g. handing over an object to a person, raise important questions such as: where the task should be achieved?; how to place the robot relatively to the human in order to ease the human action?; how to hand over an object?; and more generally, how to move in a relatively constrained environment in the presence of humans?