Social Navigation for Tour-guide Robot

We propose a force-based model for social navigation of a tour-guide robot. Social forces due to various factors like obstacles, user position and heading, have been accounted for in the model. We claim that each one of these forces makes the robot more sociable to the user and we design an experimental setup for evaluation. In the experiment, the user follows an autonomous robot to a destination in a known map, while undertaking a few simple sub-tasks in the middle, which serve as distractions. For each participant, we run several rounds of the experiment, each with different forces and a shortest path, A*-search baseline model. Using per-round subjective indicators, we propose to study the effect of our force model on constructs such as: follow-ability, perceived safety, and perceived intelligence.