Social Aware Navigation Based on Proxemic Interaction for an Autonomous Wheelchair

Abstract

Social robotics is an increasing area that has boosted the integration of robots and people in common environments. Thus, new human-robot interaction (HRI) techniques have emerged to make robots behave in acceptable and social ways. Proxemic interaction is one of these new techniques, that dictates the interaction between people and devices based on distance, which in turn defines proxemic zones. In this sense, robots must respect the proxemic zones of people around them, while navigating in the shared spaces. In this work, we propose a social aware navigation system based on proxemic that responds to voice commands integrated with a chatbot to define path planning for a wheelchair, in around a crowded environment. This social navigation system is integrated into GProxemic Navigation, a system that automatically provides the robot location and decides the proxemic zones of people that robots (an autonomous wheelchair, for this work) must not transverse during their navigation, according to the environment characteristics. With this implementation, the autonomous wheelchair can be driven to make the most efficient path respecting the social constraints of the environment