Potential human reaction aware mobile robot motion planner: Potential cost minimization framework

Robots have been stepping steadily into our daily-life. As humans are likely to exist in daily-life scenarios, “human-aware” becomes an essential point for robot navigation in these scenarios. Existing research works on human aware robot navigation rarely take potential human reaction into account in the motion planner. In contrast, we propose in this paper the concept of potential human reaction aware motion planner (PHRAMP), i.e. the robot had better take potential human reaction into account in its motion planning. We propose a general methodology coined as the potential cost minimization (PCM) framework for realizing PHRAMPs. We present some theoretical characteristics of this framework and explain its relationship with existing methods. We describe an instantiation of the PCM framework which serves as a concrete example PHRAMP to demonstrate the utility and advantage of the PCM framework.