HUMAN AWARE NAVIGATION OF A MOBILE ROBOT IN CROWDED DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Makina Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2019

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: AKIF HACINECİPOĞLU

Eş Danışman: Ahmet Buğra Koku

Danışman: Erhan İlhan Konukseven

Özet:

As mobile robots start operating in dynamic environments crowded with humans, human-aware and human-like navigation is required to make these robots navigate safely, efficiently and in socially compliant manner. People can navigate in an interactive and cooperative fashion so that, they are able to find their path to a destination even if there is no clear path leading to it. This is clearly a dexterity of humans. But the mobile robots which have to navigate in such environments lack this feature. Even perfect trajectory prediction of people is not sufficient if crowd density is above a certain level. Interactive and cooperative navigation ability of humans should be incorporated into navigation algorithms. Therefore, the scope of this study is to develop a navigation method that can be implemented in mobile robots which will make them able to navigate in crowded dynamic environments without freezing and/or frustration. For this purpose, pose-invariant and real-time people detection and tracking methods are developed initially. Then, an interactive and cooperative trajectory prediction algorithm is introduced. A mobile robot is regarded just as another agent, like other humans in the scene, so that, predicted trajectory for the robot itself becomes the planned path which results in human-like and human-aware navigation. All the developed components are tested and validated separately, and finally, together on a mobile robot. Results of the real world experiments showed that the developed method can effectively make a mobile robot navigate in human-aware fashion in dynamic environments crowded with humans.