Social constraints-based socially aware navigation framework for mobile service robots

In this paper, we propose a social timed elastic band (STEB)-based navigation framework which enables a mobile service robot to safely and socially avoid a human in dynamic social environments. The main idea of the proposed framework is to incorporate the socio-spatio-temporal characteristics of the humans including human position, motion related to the robot, and social rules into a conventional online trajectory planing algorithm. We evaluate the developed framework through a series of simulation experiments. The simulation results show that the proposed framework is fully capable of autonomously driving the mobile robot to avoid the individual humans in dynamic social environments, providing the safety and comfort for the humans and the socially acceptable behaviours for the mobile robot. © 2020 IEEE.