An Architecture for Social-Aware Navigation Based on a Chatbot Interaction

Abstract

The coexistence of service robots in social environments has been intensified in recent years, demanding Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) increasingly fluid and necessary. In this context, the present work aims to develop an architecture, called Erika. Erika provides a chatbot to interact by voice and text commands with a service robot, who implements an autonomous navigation, respecting social restrictions based on proxemic zones. An API is available in Erika for connecting the chatbot with a website application, that in turn establishes communication with the Robot Operating System (ROS) to perform simulated experiments and test the functionality of the chatbot and the social-aware navigation of the robot. Results demonstrate that the service robot can respond to the commands provided through the chatbot and , so that, finally, it can drive autonomous or manual navigation, when necessary.

Social Aware Navigation Based on Proxemic Interaction for an Autonomous Wheelchair

“…To insert the service robots in social environments, it is necessary the use of several techniques that support HRI, as well as autonomous navigation respecting social constraints. To do so, we propose a proxemic based navigation system, roughly composed by three subsystems: (i) the voice recognition system (chatbot) [8]; (ii) the GProxemic Navigation system [7]; and (iii) the social navigation algorithm [15]. In the following, we detail each component.…”

“…A chatbot implements the voice recognition system; to do so, we use the Erika architecture [8,38], which is based on the reliable Dialogflow technology, developed by Google LCC. The integration of the Erika architecture for the Chatbot in our system, allows a user to indicate the location in the environment where he/she wants to go (for example, bathroom).…”

“…In addition, it is important that robots understand human behavior and the characteristics of environments, using different tools, such as GProxemic Navigation [7], which delimits the proxemic zone according to the characteristics of the environment, and Dialogflow, which works with natural language processing. These particularities improve the HRI, as they provide the ability to analyze speech, being able to obey voice commands, such as in [8,9,10], and the capacity of respecting social constraints during robots' navigation (i.e., social navigation).…”