Interactive Motion Planning for Mobile Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments

In dynamic environments, taking static and moving obstacles into consideration in motion planning for mobile robot navigation is a technical issue. In this paper, we use a single mobile robot, for which humans are moving obstacles. Since moving humans sometimes get in the way of the robot, it must avoid collisions with them. Furthermore, if a part of the environment is crowded with humans, it is better for the robot to detour around the congested area. For this navigational challenge, we focus on the interaction between humans and the robot, so this paper proposes a motion planner for successfully getting through the human-robot interaction. The interactive motion planner is based on the hybrid use of global and local path planners. Furthermore, the local path planner is executed repetitively during the navigation. Through the human-robot interaction, the robot is enabled not only to avoid the collisions with humans but also to detour around congested areas. The emergence of this movement is the main contribution of this paper. We discuss the simulation results in terms of the effectiveness of the proposed motion planner for robot navigation in dynamic environments that include humans.