Human-Robot Autonomous System: An Interactive Architecture

Social robotics is a growing field that aims to enhance the interaction between robots and humans in everyday settings. To achieve this goal, various new techniques for human-robot interaction (HRI) have emerged. One such technique is proxemic interaction, which governs how people and robots interact based on their distance from each other, leading to the definition of proxemic zones. In our work, we present a socially-aware navigation system built on proxemic principles. This system responds to voice commands and incorporates a Chatbot to determine the robot’s path within a crowded environment. This innovative social navigation system is seamlessly integrated into GProxemic Navigation, a system that not only provides the robot’s location but also intelligently identifies the proxemic zones that the robot should avoid while navigating. These proxemic zones are determined based on the characteristics of the environment. To showcase the functionality and suitability of our proposed proxemic navigation system, we have implemented it in an autonomous Pepper Robot This implementation allows the Pepper Robot to navigate efficiently while respecting the social constraints imposed by the environment, enhancing the robot’s ability to coexist harmoniously with people in shared spaces.