—Shared control is a strategy used in assistive plat forms to combine human and robot orders to achieve a goal. Col laborative control is a specific shared control approach, in which
user’s and robot’s commands are merged into an emergent one
in a continuous way. Robot commands tend to improve efficiency
and safety. However, sometimes, assistance can be rejected by users
when their commands are too altered. This provokes frustration
and stress and, usually, decreases emergent efficiency. To improve
acceptance, robot navigation algorithms can be adapted to mimic
human behavior when possible. We propose a novel variation of
the well-known dynamic window approach (DWA) that we call
biomimetical DWA (BDWA). The BDWA relies on a reward func tion extracted from real traces from volunteers presenting different
motor disabilities navigating in a hospital environment using a rol lator for support. We have compared the BDWA with other reactive
algorithms in terms of similarity to paths completed by people with
disabilities using a robotic rollator in a rehabilitation hospital unit.
The BDWA outperforms all tested algorithms in terms of likeness
to human paths and success rate.
