Shared Autonomy for Telepresence Robots Based on People-Aware Navigation

The restrictions and isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a greater diffusion of telepresence robots as tools enabling people to assist humans and keep the contacts with them. On the one hand, telepresence robots should implement user commands. On the other, they are supposed to behave in a social manner. This work evaluates a shared autonomy approach based on people-aware navigation for teleoperating a telepresence robot. The system considers both static and dynamic people. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented shared autonomy system with respect to the traditional manual teleoperation in terms of robustness and feedback received from the participants.