Robotic Model to Search Its Standing Position in a Human-robot Community Considering Each Community Member's Personal Space

Abstract

We propose a robotic model to search a robot's standing position considering a change of human's personal spaces in a human-robot community. Recently, there has been an increasing effort to develop personal robots in human communities. In the environment, they are required not only to avoid a collision with a person but also to keep a suitable distance between a person in its community. However, their personal space in a community depends on their closeness. When a robot ignoring the change of their personal space is too close to or too far from the people, they do not feel an affinity with the robot. Therefore, a robot needs to search its standing position consider the change of their personal space. Thus, we propose the robotic model and examined whether a robot using the model can avoid to encroaching people's personal space in simulations. As a result, the rate of keeping a suitable distance accounts for about 77%.