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Ruling the Control Authority of a Service Robot Based on Information Precision

We consider the problem of guiding a senior user along a path using a robotic walking assistant. This is a particular type of path following problem, for which most of the solutions available in the literature require an exact localisation of the robot in the environment. An accurate localisation is obtained either with a heavy infrastructure (e.g., an active sensing system deployed in the environment or deploying landmarks in known positions) or using SLAM approaches with a massive data collection. Our key observation is that the intervention of the system (and a good level of accuracy) is only required in proximity of difficult decision points, while we can rely on the user in an environment where the only possibility is just to maintain a course (e.g., a corridor). The direct implication is that we can instrument the environment with a heavy infrastructure only in certain areas. This design strategy has to be complemented by an adequate control law that shifts the authority (i.e., the control of the actuators) between the robot and the user according to the accuracy of the information available to the robot. Such a control law is exactly the contribution of this paper.