Are You With Me? Determining the Association of Individuals and the Collective Social Space

Abstract

The increasing use of autonomous mobile robots in different parts of society, and not restricted only to industrial environments, makes it important to propose techniques that will allow them to behave in the most socially acceptable way as possible. In most real-world scenarios, individuals in the environment are interacting with each other and are arranged into groups. Therefore, it is paramount the proposition of techniques to efficiently and correctly identify and represent such groups. This information can be useful in different tasks such as approaching and initiating an interaction, escorting, and the navigation itself. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based approach to evaluate the possible association of individuals in the environment based on their position and body orientation. Next, based on this association, we propose a representation of the combined social space of individuals in the same group. The methodology was evaluated using synthetic and real-world datasets, showing that it achieves results comparable to or better than the state-of-the-art.