A number of socially aware robot navigation systems have been developed to enable a mobile service robot to navigate safely and socially among humans in human-robot shared workplaces. Mobile robot navigation with guarantee of human safety and comfort is the key to deploying a mobile service robot in a human-centred environment. Human safety and comfort must be evaluated through performance metrics relied on either a simple personal space of Proxemics principle or a survey of human reactions and feelings which usually varies according to social context and situations and personal preferences (characters, ages, gender).

In this talk, I will show our roadmap to develop a unified framework of socially aware robot navigation systems enabling a mobile service robot to safely and socially navigate in a human-robot social interactive environment. First, I will briefly present how our generalized framework of socially aware robot navigation systems has been developed to allow a mobile robot to avoid and approach humans with guarantee of human physical safety and psychological comfort. I will address our development of human detection and tracking, human group identification, as well as path planning and motion control techniques. Then, I will show how social rules and norms as well as personal preferences are incorporated in the unified framework of socially aware motion planning systems and performance metrics. From the solid foundation of the unified framework of socially aware robot navigation, I will discuss future research directions to make mobile robots to act as robotic co-workers in human-robot shared workspaces.

Biography

Dr. Trung Dung Ngo received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Robotics), Aalborg University in 2008, M.Sc. degree in Computer Systems Engineering (Robotics), University of Southern Denmark in 2004. He is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Sustainable Design Engineering, University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI), Canada, where he is the founder and director of the More-Than-One Robotics laboratory (www.morelab.org) and the lead researcher of the Centre for Excellence in Robotics and Industrial Automation. Before joining UPEI, he was a faculty member of the Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University and the Faculty of Science, University of Brunei. His research interests include multi-robot systems, human-robot cooperation, and modular robotics. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

The seminar will be presented at 2:45 p.m. in room Pouliot-2783.