Socially-Aware Navigation Using Topological Maps and Social Norm Learning

We present socially-aware navigation for an intelligent robot wheelchair in an environment with many pedestrians. The robot learns social norms by observing the behaviors of human pedestrians, interpreting detected biases as social norms, and incorporating those norms into its motion planning. We compare our socially-aware motion planner with a baseline motion planner that produces safe, collision-free motion.