Prevention and Resolution of Conflicts in Social Navigation -- a Survey

One of the main goals of contemporary roboticists is to enable intelligent mobile robots to operate smoothly in shared human-robot environments. One of the most fundamental necessary capabilities in service of this goal is competent navigation in this "social" context. As a result, there has a been a recent surge of research on social navigation in general, and especially on how to handle conflicts between agents in social navigation. These contributions introduce a variety of models, algorithms, and evaluation metrics, however as this research area is inherently interdisciplinary, many of the relevant papers are not comparable and there is no shared standard vocabulary. The main goal of this survey is to bridge this gap by introducing such a common language, using it to survey existing work, and highlighting open problems. It starts by defining a conflict in social navigation, and offers a detailed taxonomy of its components. This survey then maps existing work into this taxonomy, while discussing papers using its framing. Finally, this paper propose some future research directions and open problems that are currently on the frontier of social navigation to help focus ongoing and future research.