Recent trends in social aware robot navigation: A survey

With the robots tending to accumulate more and more capabilities beyond the level of acting in a deterministic fashion, the idea of introducing them into our every day lives seems to be closer now. Robotics systems and techniques appeared during the recent years have achieved astonishing potential to perceive and interpret their surrounding not only as low level features but also close to human understandable concepts. Such advances, in conjunction with the aspiration to incorporate robots into domestic or public places, led to the flourishing of fields dealing with their response in human presence. Following this notion, the field of social mapping was recently introduced in order to manage the shared space among robots and individuals in an ordinary fashion. This manuscript aims to systemize the recent literature by describing the required levels of robot perception, focusing on methods related to robot's social awareness, the availability of datasets these methods can be compared with, as well as issues that remain open and need to be confronted when robots operate in close proximity with humans.