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We propose a demonstration of the Social Environment for Autonomous Navigation with Virtual Reality (VR) for advancing research in Human-Robot Interaction. In our demonstration, a user controls a virtual avatar in simulation and performs directed navigation tasks with a mobile robot in a warehouse environment. Our demonstration shows how researchers can leverage the immersive nature of VR to study robot navigation from a user-centered perspective in densely populated environments while avoiding physical safety concerns common with operating robots in the real world. This is important for studying interactions with robots driven by algorithms that are early in their development lifecycle.
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EPUI: Experimental Platform for Urban Informatics
Recent studies in urban navigation have revealed new demands (e.g., diversity, safety, happiness, serendipity) for the navigation services that are critical to providing useful recommendations to travelers. This exposes the need to design next-generation navigation services that accommodate these newly emerging aspects. In this paper, we present a prototype system, namely, EPUI (an Experimental Platform of Urban Informatics), which provides a testbed for exploring and evaluating venues and route recommendation solutions that balance between different objectives (i.e., demands) including the newly discovered ones. In addition, EPUI incorporates a modularized design, enabling researchers to upload their own algorithms and compare them to well-known algorithms using different performance metrics. Its user interface makes it easily usable by both end-user and experienced researchers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1739413
- PAR ID:
- 10114042
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Management of Data - SIGMOD'18
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1761 to 1764
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3183713.3193560
