The coexistence of service robots in social environments has been intensified in recent years, demanding Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) increasingly fluid and necessary. In this context, the present work aims to develop an architecture, called Erika. Erika provides a chatbot to interact by voice and text commands with a service robot, who implements an autonomous navigation, respecting social restrictions based on proxemic zones. An API is available in Erika for connecting the chatbot with a website application, that in turn establishes communication with the Robot Operating System (ROS) to perform simulated experiments and test the functionality of the chatbot and the social-aware navigation of the robot. Results demonstrate that the service robot can respond to the commands provided through the chatbot and , so that, finally, it can drive autonomous or manual navigation, when necessary.

Social robotics is an increasing area that has boosted the integration of robots and people in common environments. Thus, new human-robot interaction (HRI) techniques have emerged to make robots behave in acceptable and social ways. Proxemic interaction is one of these new techniques, that dictates the interaction between people and devices based on distance, which in turn defines proxemic zones. In this sense, robots must respect the proxemic zones of people around them, while navigating in the shared spaces. In this work, we propose a social aware navigation system based on proxemic that responds to voice commands integrated with a chatbot to define path planning for a wheelchair, in around a crowded environment. This social navigation system is integrated into GProxemic Navigation, a system that automatically provides the robot location and decides the proxemic zones of people that robots (an autonomous wheelchair, for this work) must not transverse during their navigation, according to the environment characteristics. With this implementation, the autonomous wheelchair can be driven to make the most efficient path respecting the social constraints of the environment