A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation . While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation of algorithms that tackle social navigation remains hard because it involves not just robotic agents moving in static environments but also dynamic human agents and their perceptions of the appropriateness of robot behavior. In contrast, clear, repeatable, and accessible benchmarks have accelerated progress in fields like computer vision, natural language processing and traditional robot navigation by enabling researchers to fairly compare algorithms, revealing limitations of existing solutions and illuminating promising new directions. We believe the same approach can benefit social navigation. In this article, we pave the road toward common, widely accessible, and repeatable benchmarking criteria to evaluate social robot navigation. Our contributions include (a) a definition of a socially navigating robot as one that respects the principles of safety, comfort, legibility, politeness, social competency, agent understanding, proactivity, and responsiveness to context, (b) guidelines for the use of metrics, development of scenarios, benchmarks, datasets, and simulators to evaluate social navigation, and (c) a design of a social navigation metrics framework to make it easier to compare results from different simulators, robots, and datasets.

This work aims to find discriminative EEG-based features and appropriate classification methods that can categorise brainwave patterns based on their level of activity or frequency for mental state recognition useful for human-machine interaction. By using the Muse headband with four EEG sensors (TP9, AF7, AF8, TP10), we categorised three possible states such as relaxing, neutral and concentrating based on a few states of mind defined by cognitive behavioural studies. We have created a dataset with five individuals and sessions lasting one minute for each class of mental state in order to train and test different methods. Given the proposed set of features extracted from the EEG headband five signals (alpha, beta, theta, delta, gamma), we have tested a combination of different features selection algorithms and classifier models to compare their performance in terms of recognition accuracy and number of features needed. Different tests such as 10-fold cross validation were performed. Results show that only 44 features from a set of over 2100 features are necessary when used with classical classifiers such as Bayesian Networks, Support Vector Machines and Random Forests, attaining an overall accuracy over 87%.

This study suggests a new approach to EEG data classification by exploring the idea of using evolutionary computation to both select useful discriminative EEG features and optimise the topology of Artificial Neural Networks. An evolutionary algorithm is applied to select the most informative features from an initial set of 2550 EEG statistical features. Optimisation of a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) is performed with an evolutionary approach before classification to estimate the best hyperparameters of the network. Deep learning and tuning with Long Short‐Term Memory (LSTM) are also explored, and Adaptive Boosting of the two types of models is tested for each problem. Three experiments are provided for comparison using different classifiers: one for attention state classification, one for emotional sentiment classification, and a third experiment in which the goal is to guess the number a subject is thinking of. The obtained results show that an Adaptive Boosted LSTM can achieve an accuracy of 84.44%, 97.06%, and 9.94% on the attentional, emotional, and number datasets, respectively. An evolutionary‐optimised MLP achieves results close to the Adaptive Boosted LSTM for the two first experiments and significantly higher for the number‐guessing experiment with an Adaptive Boosted DEvo MLP reaching 31.35%, while being significantly quicker to train and classify. In particular, the accuracy of the nonboosted DEvo MLP was of 79.81%, 96.11%, and 27.07% in the same benchmarks. Two datasets for the experiments were gathered using a Muse EEG headband with four electrodes corresponding to TP9, AF7, AF8, and TP10 locations of the international EEG placement standard. The EEG MindBigData digits dataset was gathered from the TP9, FP1, FP2, and TP10 locations.