Human-aware robot navigation: A survey

•A comprehensive collection of the literature on human-aware robot navigation.•Classification according to features: comfortable, natural and social constraints.•Grouping by functionality: prediction, pose, path, behavior and local planning.

Navigation is a basic skill for autonomous robots. In the last years human–robot interaction has become an important research field that spans all of the robot capabilities including perception, reasoning, learning, manipulation and navigation. For navigation, the presence of humans requires novel approaches that take into account the constraints of human comfort as well as social rules. Besides these constraints, putting robots among humans opens new interaction possibilities for robots, also for navigation tasks, such as robot guides. This paper provides a survey of existing approaches to human-aware navigation and offers a general classification scheme for the presented methods.