Human-robot collaborative navigation search using social reward sources

Abstract

This paper proposes a Social Reward Sources (SRS) design for a Human-Robot Collaborative Navigation (HRCN) task: human-robot collaborative search. It is a flexible approach capable of handling the collaborative task, human-robot interaction and environment restrictions, all integrated on a common environment. We modelled task rewards based on unexplored area observability and isolation and evaluated the model through different levels of human-robot communication.The models are validated through quantitative evaluation against both agents’ individual performance and qualitative surveying of participants’ perception. After that, the three proposed communication levels are com-pared against each other using the previous metrics.