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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01539 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01539/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08835/) (2018)
- [Variational Information Maximisation for Intrinsically Motivated Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.08731/) (2015)
- [Socially Aware Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08862/) (2017)
- [Safe Planning in Dynamic Environments using Conformal Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10254/) (2022)
- [Core Challenges of Social Robot Navigation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05668/) (2021)
- [Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16740/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Socially Aware Robot Navigation: Taxonomy and Future Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.06922/) (2023)
- [Learning a Group-Aware Policy for Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12291/) (2020)
- [Multi-Robot Cooperative Navigation in Crowds: A Game-Theoretic Learning-Based Model Predictive Control Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06964/) (2023)
- [Social Navigation with Human Empowerment driven Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08158/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [When Assisting One Disempowers Another](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04177/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.