Social Navigation

In robotics, the problem of moving through an environment that contains people, in a way that respects social norms, comfort, and safety. Social navigation goes beyond obstacle avoidance: it requires predicting pedestrian intentions, respecting personal space, interpreting queues, crowds, and thresholds, and sometimes initiating social communication (for example, asking people to step aside). For assistive navigation robots that guide blind users, social navigation is a core capability because the robot acts in spaces that were designed around sighted social conventions. Failures in social navigation contribute to the freezing-robot problem, in which a robot stalls indefinitely in dense or unpredictable pedestrian traffic.