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

Jacob Sharp, Ulysses Bernardet

Abstract: 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” tha