R
Rosie
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Human Empowerment as a Metric for Socially Conscious Robot Navigation
Introduces human empowerment — an information-theoretic measure of an agent's capacity to influence its own future (the channel capacity / mutual information between its actions and resulting future states) — as an objective for social robot navigation. Unlike traditional metrics such as proxemics and behavior naturalness, which encode only human comfort and social-norm adherence, empowerment captures a human's autonomy and adaptability in dynamic environments; the paper integrates a human-empowerment term into the robot's navigation policy so the robot preserves and enhances nearby humans' freedom of action.