Jido

Navigation : NHP module

The presence of humans raises new issues in motion and manipulation planning; clearly the presence of humans must be taken explicitly into account in all levels of robots design in order to ensure:

* A safe motion, i.e. a motion that in any case would not physically harm/injure the humans in the environment.

* A reliable and effective motion, i.e, that achieves the task adequately considering the motion capacities of the robot.

* A user friendly motion, i.e, that takes into account a motion model of the human as well as his preferences and needs.

These aspects can be reflected to various levels of robot's design. In the physical design process, making the robot's structure softer using light and soft material will minimize the consequences of a possible impact and making the robot look less threatening will ease its interaction with humans. We claim that the planning is a very important stage to include the human interaction issues. It is obvious that, as the motions and the posture of the robot are calculated by the planner, a motion that takes into account the presence of humans will result a friendly interaction. Our research is focused on developing a navigation and manipulation planner that takes explicitly into account the presence of humans in the environment.

The figure above illustrate the use of the human aware motion planner with the rackham robot (using the same module); a person and robot move toward each other. The robot changes its trajectory to avoid a collision. After passing next to the human, instead of returning immediately to its previous course, it gives a little distance to the human. This behaviour ensures a comfortable and risk free motion for the human.

related publications

Emrah Akin Sisbot, Luis F. Marin-Urias, Rachid Alami and Thierry Simeon, A Human Aware Mobile Robot Motion Planner. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Volume: 23, Issue: 5, pp: 874-883, October, 2007.

Perspective Placement : PSP

PSP for robot placement considering perspective taking from human is integrated as an OpenGenoM module embedded with NHP and MHP services in the LAAS architecture. This module uses an a-priori 3D environment model in order to place the robot in a configuration inside person's field of view and where the robot can see the person which it is interacting with, this without visual obstructions for robot's perception. PSP can also use this information to help robot to place itself to observe another fixed objects on the environment (tables, chairs, etc). The module modifies the position and orientation of the object linked to a virtual camera, and using the same method of inverse kinematics as MHP, it can find/change a goal/start configuration for navigation, manipulation or simply for interaction.