Intelligent Robot Navigation Based on Human Emotional Model in Human-Aware Environment

This paper presents a method for controlling a mobile robot in dynamic environments, based on an investigation of human's impression of the robot movements. Human-aware robot navigation has been discussed in terms of comfort, naturalness and sociability. Even a robot has a function to perform and move safely around individuals, the people may feel annoyance and stress about the performance. The naturalness of robot's movements in human societies is one of the most important topics for human-aware robot navigation. Moreover, such robot systems are required to adaptively decide the priority of behaviors such as collision avoiding, target tracing, and wall following to achieve the navigation objective. In this study, we therefore developed a fuzzy controller for challenging the above issue. We conducted a questionnaire for investigating human's impression of the movements and modeling the degree of emotional intensity after the person followed close behind the robot. Moreover, we built a simulated environment to evaluate the performance of the mobile robot in a dynamic environment.