Resumen
- Smart walkers may be used to assist human navigation. However, social conventions and human behavior should be taken into consideration to allow their interaction with other people. This paper presents a navigation strategy for a smart walker with social conventions defined by proxemics, which uses an admittance controller to generate haptic and visual signals for a safe navigation within a corridor. This controller was validated in two experiments. The first one consisted of recreating, in a simulation environment, five typical situations that could occur in a corridor. The second experiment consisted of validating the controller in a real environment within the corridor. In this case, people generate uncontrolled situations in the corridor. This controller allowed a safe social navigation with a comfortable velocity of 0.244 m/s ± 0.1196.