The Missing Tip: Lack of Micro-Movements Impairs Navigation Realism in Artificial Social Agents

Navigation is critical to an intelligent social agent’s ability to interact with the world and any other agent, virtual or otherwise. In order to create a truly realistic artificial social agent, unconscious human micro-movements need to be simulated. We see this as an important goal for the research area. Examples of these micro-movements include orienting while walking and back-stepping, strafing with attention focused elsewhere, and micro-orientations during locomotion. We postulate that there is a gap in research around these micro-movements within the field of navigation that we hope to contribute to filling. Most research in this field is focused on the understandably important pathfinding aspect of navigation; moving between two spatial locations. There is little to no research being done on micro-movements and making a truly realistic navigation system for artificial social agents. Moreover, there exists no canonical way of describing these movements and ”micro-movements” that are so characteristic for human spatial behaviour. Here we propose a set of standardised descriptors of movement configurations, that will be able to be used as building blocks for spatial behaviour experimentation, and as the basis for behaviour generation models. We see this as an important tool in the creation of navigation systems that are able to more readily include these kinds of behaviours, with hope that the aforementioned configurations will improve development of realistic movement systems.