User Preferences on Emotion-Aware Social Navigation for Assistive Robots in Human-Centered Environments

The presented work aims to explore and investigate people's preferences for the navigation and proxemic behaviors of assistive robots in human-centered environments. The study includes both a gamified experiment using a virtual robot-like avatar in a simulated hospital environment and real-world robot navigation scenarios with surveys to evaluate people's preferences of social zones under varying emotional conditions. First, a gamified simulation is designed where players control a robot-like avatar navigating through a hospital setting populated with virtual agents representing types of people in a common hospital environment, displaying different emotions. The findings highlight how different emotions (happy, neutral, and angry) of the people around the avatar/robot affect the perception of social navigation, showing the need to include emotional awareness in social navigation of robots in future works. Then, the impact of this emotional awareness on social navigation is analyzed through user evaluations. Participants are presented with the video recordings of a physical robot's navigation scenarios based on the emotional states of pedestrians in the environment, and their responses are investigated through a survey to evaluate their navigation preferences. The results show that participants prefer robots to adjust social zones based on emotional states, contributing to safer and more comfortable navigation. These findings provide valuable insights for improving social navigation of robots in human-centered environments, especially in emotionally sensitive domains like healthcare settings.