Deliverable 3.5: Social Navigation

This task brings socially aware navigation strategies on the commercial platform Pepper. Special focus was put on the factors:

  • Safety: No physical harm. 
  • Comfort: Absence of annoyance and stress for humans.
  • Naturalness: Similarity between robots and human’s behaviour patterns.
  • Sociability: Adherence to explicit high-level socio-cultural conventions.

This deliverable reports on the developments made by Softbank Robotics Europe, to meet the objectives of this task between months M1 and M30 of the project. Complementary work by ETHZ on interfacing social navigation behaviours with the CrowdBot local motion planner is described in CrowdBot deliverable D33. Furthermore, complementary work by UCL on investigating similarities and differences between Pepper robot and a powered wheelchair in crowded social situations is presented in CrowdBot deliverable D14 section 2.2.