Peoplexe2x80x99s VFormation and SidebySide Model Adapted to Accompany Groups of People by Social Robots This paper presents a new method to allow robots to accompany a person or a group of people imitating pedestrians behavior. Twopeople groups usually walk in a sidebyside formation and threepeople groups walk in a Vformation so that they can see each other. For this reason, the proposed method combines a Sidebyside and Vformation pedestrian model with the Anticipative Kinodynamic Planner (AKP). Combining these methods, the robot is able to do an anticipatory accompaniment of groups of humans, as well as to avoid static and dynamic obstacles in advance, while keeping the prescribed formations. The proposed framework allows also a dynamical repositioning of the robot, if the physical position of the partners change in the group formation. Furthermore, people have a randomness factor that the robot has to manage, for that reason, the system was adapted to deal with changes in peoplexe2x80x99s velocity, orientation and occlusions. Finally, the method has been validated using synthetic experiments and reallife experiments with our Tibi robot. In addition, a user study has been realized to reveal the social acceptability of the method.

Follow The Robot: Modeling Coupled HumanRobot Dyads During Navigation Many robot applications being explored involve robots leading humans during navigation. Developing effective robots for this task requires a way for robots to understand and model a humanxe2x80x99s following behavior. In this paper, we present results from a user study of how humans follow a guide robot in the halls of an office building. We then present a datadriven Markovian model of this following behavior, and demonstrate its generalizability across time interval and trajectory length. Finally, we integrate the model into a global planner and run a simulation experiment to investigate the benefits of coupled humanrobot planning. Our results suggest that the proposed model effectively predicts how humans follow a robot, and that the coupled planner, while taking longer, leads the human significantly closer to the target position.