Felix Lindner, Freiburg University, DE
One aspect of social robot navigation is to avoid personal space intrusions. Computationally, this can be achieved by introducing social costs into a robot's path planner's objective function. This article tackles the normative question of how robots should aggregate social costs incurred by multiple personal-space intrusions. Of particular interest is the question whether numbers should count, i.e., whether a robot ought to intrude into one person's personal space in order to avoid intruding into multiple personal spaces. This work proposes four different modes of aggregation of the costs of intrusions into personal space, discusses some of the philosophical arguments, and presents results from a pilot study.
