Title: In Search of a Lost Metric: Human Empowerment as a Pillar of Socially Conscious Navigation Show Chinese title

Title: 寻找失落的度量：人类赋权作为社会意识导航的支柱

Abstract: In social robot navigation, traditional metrics like proxemics and behavior naturalness emphasize human comfort and adherence to social norms but often fail to capture an agent's autonomy and adaptability in dynamic environments. This paper introduces human empowerment, an information-theoretic concept that measures a human's ability to influence their future states and observe those changes, as a complementary metric for evaluating social compliance. This metric reveals how robot navigation policies can indirectly impact human empowerment. We present a framework that integrates human empowerment into the evaluation of social performance in navigation tasks. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that human empowerment as a metric not only aligns with intuitive social behavior, but also shows statistically significant differences across various robot navigation policies. These results provide a deeper understanding of how different policies affect social compliance, highlighting the potential of human empowerment as a complementary metric for future research in social navigation. Show Chinese abstract

Abstract: 在社交机器人导航中，传统的度量标准如亲密距离和行为自然性强调人类的舒适度和社会规范的遵守，但往往无法捕捉代理在动态环境中的自主性和适应性。 本文引入了人类赋权，这是一个信息论概念，用于衡量人类影响自身未来状态并观察这些变化的能力，作为评估社会合规性的补充度量标准。 该度量标准揭示了机器人导航策略如何间接影响人类赋权。 我们提出一个框架，将人类赋权整合到导航任务中社会表现的评估中。 通过数值模拟，我们证明了人类赋权作为度量标准不仅与直观的社会行为一致，而且在各种机器人导航策略中表现出统计学上的显著差异。 这些结果加深了对不同策略如何影响社会合规性的理解，突显了人类赋权作为未来社会导航研究中补充度量标准的潜力。