Enhancing robot reliability for health-care facilities by means of Human-Aware Navigation Planning

TL;DR

The Co-operative Human-Aware Navigation planner has been integrated into the ROS-based differential-drive robot MARRtina and exhaustively challenged within various simulated contexts and scenarios to draw attention to the integrated system's benefits and identify its drawbacks or instances of poor performance while exploring the scope of system capabilities and creating a full characterization of its applicability.

Abstract

With the aim of enabling robots to cooperate with humans, carry out human-like tasks, or navigate among humans, we need to ensure that they are equipped with the ability to comprehend human behaviors and use the extracted knowledge for intelligent decision-making. This ability is particularly important in the safety-critical and human-centred environment of health-care institutions. In the field of robotic navigation, the most cutting-edge approaches to enhancing robot reliability in the application domain of healthcare facilities and in general pertain to augmenting navigation systems with human-aware properties. To implement this in our work, the Co-operative Human-Aware Navigation planner has been integrated into the ROS-based differential-drive robot MARRtina and exhaustively challenged within various simulated contexts and scenarios (mainly modelling the situations relevant in the medical domain) to draw attention to the integrated system's benefits and identify its drawbacks or instances of poor performance while exploring the scope of system capabilities and creating a full characterization of its applicability. The simulation results are then presented to medical experts, and the enhanced robot acceptability within the domain is validated with them as the robot is further planned for deployment.

Figures (24)

• Figure 1: MARRtina bedside robot. Photograph from the gallery of the robot web page. (https://www.marrtino.org/robots).
• Figure 2: PROXIMITY: Intimate distance – indicates a closer relationship; Personal distance – occurs between family members or close friends; Social distance – used with individuals who are acquaintances; Public distance – used in public speaking situations. Image credit: Jean-Louis Grall, via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Personal_Spaces_in_Proxemics.svg.
• Figure 3: CoHAN planner software architecture. Image credit: Singamaneni et al, ref:cohan.
• Figure 4: Costmap layers around the static humans, displayed in RViz. The yellow arrow denotes a human pose. The Human Safety layer (blue) is a 2D Gaussian around the human, and the Human Visibility layer (red) is a 2D half Gaussian on the backside of the human. Both of these layers have a cutoff radius beyond which the cost is zero.
• Figure 5: Mode transition scheme. The arrow represents a one-sided transition; the double arrow represents a two-sided transition.