Section: New Results

Attention-Based Navigation

Participants : Adrian Bourgaud, Carlos Di Pietro, Thierry Fraichard, Rémi Paulin, Patrick Reignier, Andre Van Den Berg.

Assistant robots and robot companions are designed to share the human living space, to navigate among and interact with human beings. From the mobility point of view, roboticists have recently striven to develop navigation scheme geared towards achieving so-called “socially acceptable motions”. To that end, various concepts borrowed from environmental psychology and anthropology have been used, the “personal space” concept from Proxemics being perhaps the most widely used. The purpose of our work here is to further the research in this area by taking into account other factors such as human activities, interaction configurations and intentions. An attentional model derived from cognitive psychology is used to dynamically determine the “focus of attention” of the persons involved in a given task. Depending on the task at hand, the robot uses the attention information in order to decide its future course of action so as, for instance, to attract one person’s attention or, on the contrary, to minimize the disturbance caused. In 2013, a paper describing the first results obtained was presented during the Israeli Conf. on Robotics [14] .