Paper Info
Title
Where Can I Help? Human-Aware Placement of Service Robots
Abstract
As service robots are entering more and more homes it gets evermore important to find behavior strategies that ensure a harmonic coexistence between those systems and their users. In this paper, we present a novel approach to enable a mobile robot to provide timely assistance to a user moving in its environment, while simultaneously avoiding unnecessary movements as well as interferences with the user. We developed a framework that uses information about the last object interaction to predict possible future movement destinations of the user and infer where they might need assistance based on prior knowledge. Given this prediction, the robot chooses the best position for itself that minimizes the time until assistance can be provided as well as avoids interferences with other activities of the user. We evaluated our approach in comparison to state-of-the-art methods in simulated environments and performed a user study in a virtual reality environment. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach is able to decrease both the time until assistance is provided and the travel distance of the robot as well as increases the average distance between the user and the robot in comparison to state-of-the-art systems. Additionally, the robot behavior generated by our method is rated as more pleasant by our study participants than comparable literature approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/RO-MAN47096.2020.9223331
2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
DocType
ISSN
ISBN
Conference
1944-9445
978-1-7281-6075-7
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lilli Bruckschen102.03
Kira Bungert201.35
Moritz Wolter313.73
Stefan Krumpen4123.62
Michael Weinmann510517.89
Reinhard Klein6133797.71
Maren Bennewitz711.04