Robot navigation in the presence of humans raises new issues for motion planning and control when the humans must be taken explicitly into account. We claim that a human aware motion planner (HAMP) must not only provide safe robot paths, but also synthesize good, socially acceptable and legible paths. This paper focuses on a motion planner that takes explicitly into account its human partners by reasoning about their accessibility, their vision field and their preferences in terms of relative human-robot placement and motions in realistic environments. This planner is part of a human-aware motion and manipulation planning and control system that we aim to develop in order to achieve motion and manipulation tasks in the presence or in synergy with humans.

Robots' interaction with humans raises new issues for geometrical reasoning where the humans must be taken explicitly into account. We claim that a human-aware motion system must not only elaborate safe robot motions, but also synthesize good, socially acceptable and legible movement. This paper focuses on a manipulation planner and a placement mechanism that take explicitly into account its human partners by reasoning about their accessibility, their vision field and their preferences. This planner is part of a human-aware motion and manipulation planning and control system that we aim to develop in order to achieve motion and manipulation tasks in presence or in synergy with humans.

Human robot interaction brings new challenges to the geometric reasoning and space sharing. The robot should not only reason on its own capacities but also consider the actual situation by looking from human's eyes, thus ¿putting itself to human's perspective¿. In humans, the ¿visual perspective taking¿ ability begins to appear by 24 months of age and is used to determine if another person can see an object or not. In this paper, we present a geometric reasoning mechanism that employs psychological concepts of ¿perspective taking¿ and ¿mental rotation¿ in order to reason what the human sees, what the robot sees and where the robot should focus to share human's attention. This geometric reasoning mechanism is demonstrated with HRP-2 humanoid robot in a human-robot face-to-face interaction context.

In this paper we present the design framework of a shopping assistant system to be used in supermarkets mainly by elderly or disabled people. The whole system is based on the interaction of three different kinds of electronic devices: a) mobile devices that users carry with them (smart phones or electronic tablets), b) autonomous mobile robots assisting users by displaying information and carrying groceries, and finally, c) the supermarket technological infrastructure (database servers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth access points, etc.). These components interact through a common technological platform, allowing the user to prepare his/her shopping list, and then using it with the robot as an assistant, during his/her shopping process.