Human Comfort Factors in People Navigation: Literature Review, Taxonomy and Framework

Due to demographic shifts and improvements in medical care, person navigation systems (PNS) for people with disabilities are becoming increasingly important. So far, PNS have received less attention than mobile robots. However, the work on mobile robots cannot always be transferred to PNS because there are important differences in navigating people. In this paper, we address these differences by providing a comprehensive literature review on human comfort factors in people navigation, presenting a unified taxonomy for PNS and proposing a framework for integrating these factors into a navigation stack. Based on the results, we extract the key differences and human comfort factors that have been addressed in current literature. Furthermore, the literature review shows that there is no unified taxonomy in this field. To address this, we introduce the term people navigation and a taxonomy to categorize existing systems. Finally, we summarize the human comfort factors that have been considered so far and provide an outlook on their implementation. Our survey serves as a foundation for a comprehensive research in people navigation and identifies open challenges.