Evaluation of Robotic Navigation Model Considering Group Norms of Personal Space in Human–Robot Communities

We propose a robotic model that helps determine a robot’s position when there are changes in the human’s personal space in a human–robot community. Recently, there have been a number of efforts to develop personal robots suitable for human communities. Determining a robot’s position is important not only to avoid collisions with humans but also to maintain a socially acceptable distance with humans. The inter–personal space maintained by persons in a community depends on the closeness of the persons. Therefore, robots need to determine the positions of persons and evaluate the changes made in their personal space. In this paper, we propose a robotic model and examine whether the experimental participants could distinguish the robot’s trajectory from the human’s trajectory in the simulation. Our results showed that none of the participants could completely distinguish between the robot’s and human’s trajectories.