Social Elastic Band with Prediction and Anticipation: Enhancing Real-Time Path Trajectory Optimization for Socially Aware Robot Navigation

As social robots are projected to become an integral part of human life in the coming decades, their ability to adapt movement and trajectory when in proximity to people is essential for ensuring social acceptance during human-robot interaction. A key aspect of this adaptability involves predicting and anticipating human intents during robot navigation. Despite significant strides in the social navigation of autonomous robots within human environments, opportunities for advancements in related algorithms persist. This paper presents a novel real-time path trajectory optimization algorithm for socially aware robot navigation, grounded in the social elastic band concept, incorporating prediction and anticipation of human movements to adapt its forward velocity. Building upon the elastic band framework introduced in the 1990s for adapting robot trajectories in dynamic environments, our proposal of social elastic band differentiates between objects and human presence. This distinction allows for the definition of social interaction spaces and their relationship to the elastic band, facilitating the generation of socially accepted paths that rapidly adapt to environmental changes without causing a disturbance. Integrated into the SNAPE social navigation framework, the algorithm has been tested and validated through simulations and real-world experiments in various environments.