Exploiting human cooperation in human-centered robot navigation

Robot path planning has traditionally concentrated on collision-free paths. For robots that collaborate closely with humans, however, the situation is different in two respects: 1) the humans in the robot´s environment are not randomly moving objects, but cognitive beings who can deliberately make way for a robot to pass and 2) the quality of a navigation plan depends less on quantitative efficiency criteria, but rather on the acceptance of humans. In this paper, we introduce a robot navigation approach that takes into account human-centered requirements and the collaborative nature of the interaction between the human and the robot.