  The primary aim of this paper is to investigate the integration of emotions
into the social navigation framework to analyse its effect on both navigation
and human physiological safety and comfort. The proposed framework uses leg
detection to find the whereabouts of people and computes adaptive proxemic
zones based on their emotional state. We designed several case studies in a
simulated environment and examined 3 different emotions; positive (happy),
neutral and negative (angry). A survey study was conducted with 70 participants
to explore their impressions about the navigation of the robot and compare the
human safety and comfort measurements results. Both survey and simulation
results showed that integrating emotions into proxemic zones has a significant
effect on the physical safety of a human. The results revealed that when a
person is angry, the robot is expected to navigate further than the standard
distance to support his/her physiological comfort and safety. The results also
showed that reducing the navigation distance is not preferred when a person is
happy.
