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arXiv · 2411.04678

Socially-Aware Opinion-Based Navigation with Oval Limit Cycles

Giulia d'Addato·Placido Falqueto·Luigi Palopoli·Daniele Fontanelli
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Abstract

When humans move in a shared space, they choose navigation strategies that preserve their mutual safety. At the same time, each human seeks to minimise the number of modifications to her/his path. In order to achieve this result, humans use unwritten rules and reach a consensus on their decisions about the motion direction by exchanging non-verbal messages. They then implement their choice in a mutually acceptable way. Socially-aware navigation denotes a research effort aimed at replicating this logic inside robots. Existing results focus either on how robots can participate in negotiations with humans, or on how they can move in a socially acceptable way. We propose a holistic approach in which the two aspects are jointly considered. Specifically, we show that by combining opinion dynamics (to reach a consensus) with vortex fields (to generate socially acceptable trajectories), the result outperforms the application of the two techniques in isolation.

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Giulia d'Addato, Placido Falqueto, Luigi Palopoli, Daniele Fontanelli. 2024-11-07. Socially-Aware Opinion-Based Navigation with Oval Limit Cycles. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04678

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