A Qualitative Representation of Social Conventions for Application in Robotics.

Acceptance of everyday robots will largely depend on their ability of social interaction. Patterns of socially acceptable behaviorhave been characterized in social science by means of abstract concepts of space and time.This makes integration with robot navigation a challenging problem.Moreover, an integration should allow the robot to build awareness of these patterns as in reality there will be misunderstandings a robot should be able to respond to. The contribution of this paper is a representation of navigation patterns that is based on qualitative representations of space.We present a logic with clear semantics for specification of navigation patterns and show how it allows several conventions of social interactions to be represented. We also outline integration with robot navigation and give examples with real world situations.