Towards A Unified Framework of Socially Aware Robot Navigation: From Human Physical Safety and Psychological Comfort to Robots' Contextual and Cultural Awareness

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Industrial robots have set the important milestone in the era of automated machines used to replace humans in carrying out repeatable and dangerous jobs in manufacturing over 50 years. However, in this century, professional and domestic mobile service robots play the key role as human counterparts and caregivers in both industrial and daily-life settings. Mobile service robots not only replace humans in minimizing their hands-on tasks but also work with humans to stimulate them to focus on cognitively demanding tasks. Nevertheless, the first and most important concern is how to enable mobile service robots to work around or with humans without causing them danger. Moreover, we expect to make professional and domestic service robots to interact with human co-workers in culturally and contextually acceptable manners when human physical safety and psychological comfort have been completely guaranteed. To overcome the existing shortcomings of conventional mobile robot navigation systems and enhance the autonomous navigability of mobile service robots in human-robot interactive environments, this research program is designed to develop a unified framework of socially aware robot navigation system enabling mobile service robots to guarantee not only (1) human physical safety and (2) psychological comfort but also to enhance the robots' (3) contextual and (4) cultural awareness in human-robot interactive environments. I will advance the robot perception by incorporating socio-spatio-temporal human characteristics and human social conventions into the modeling and representation of individuals, group of people, and humans interacting with objects. I will develop a human-aware motion planning and control allowing a mobile robot to avoid and approach a person, a group of people, or people interacting with objects with socially acceptable behaviors according to their contextual and cultural norms while guaranteeing human physical safety and psychological comfort. To help the mobile robot to operate in complex and unpredictable human environments, I will develop and integrate online interactive learning algorithms into the robot perception, reasoning, motion planning and control so that the robot is capable of autonomously learning to adapt to different social contexts and situations with respect to human culture. The ultimate goal of this research program is to increase human trust in mobile service robots by consolidating the robot navigation with guaranty of human physical safety and psychological comfort and enhance human performance at the cognitive level by improving autonomy of such mobile robots with social and cultural awareness. This research program will not only make a new kind of production technology and generate new knowledge to the current state of the art of mobile robotics but also contribute to training robotics experts for the Canadian high-tech job market.