Navigation in the presence of humans

Robot navigation in the presence of humans raises new issues for motion planning and control since the humans safety and comfort must be taken explicitly into account. We claim that a human-aware motion planner must not only elaborate safe robot paths, but also plan good, socially acceptable and legible paths. Our aim is to build a planner that takes explicitly into account the human partner by reasoning about his accessibility, his vision field and potential shared motions. This paper focuses on a navigation planner that takes into account the humans existence explicitly. 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 a collaborative way with the human. We are conducting research in a multidisciplinary perspective, (1) running user studies and (2) developing an algorithmic framework able to integrate knowledge acquired through the trials. We illustrate here a first step by implementing a human-friendly approach motion by the robot