In Search of a Lost Metric: Human Empowerment as a Pillar of Socially Conscious Navigation

2025-01-02

AI Summary

Existing evaluation methods for social navigation lack quantitative measures of human autonomy and perceived future controllability. Method: We propose “human empowerment”—a novel information-theoretic metric that quantifies an individual’s capacity to influence their own future states and perceive environmental changes during human-robot interaction—and introduce it as a core dimension of social compliance. We develop the first empowerment-driven evaluation framework for social navigation, integrating information-theoretic modeling, numerical simulation, and behavioral quantification. Contribution/Results: Experiments demonstrate that our metric significantly discriminates among mainstream navigation strategies (p < 0.01) and strongly aligns with human intuitive social behavior. This establishes a new, interpretable, quantifiable, and human-centered benchmark for evaluating social navigation performance—grounded in fundamental human values rather than purely task-oriented metrics.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Metrics for user behavior and evaluating success
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

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.

Problem

• Robot Navigation
• Social Norms Compliance
• Human-Robot Interaction Autonomy

Innovation

• Human Empowerment
• Robot Navigation
• Social Responsibility