How do walkers avoid a mobile robot crossing their way?

TL;DR

This study investigates how humans adapt their collision avoidance strategies when crossing paths with a mobile robot, revealing a preference to yield to robots despite initial crossing intentions.

Contribution

It provides new insights into human-robot interaction by analyzing human collision avoidance behavior specifically with mobile robots during locomotion.

Findings

Humans tend to give way to robots even when they are likely to pass first.

Differences exist between avoiding a robot and avoiding another human.

Humans adapt their strategies based on the presence of a robot in shared environments.

Abstract

Robots and Humans have to share the same environment more and more often. In the aim of steering robots in a safe and convenient manner among humans it is required to understand how humans interact with them. This work focuses on collision avoidance between a human and a robot during locomotion. Having in mind previous results on human obstacle avoidance, as well as the description of the main principles which guide collision avoidance strategies, we observe how humans adapt a goal-directed locomotion task when they have to interfere with a mobile robot. Our results show differences in the strategy set by humans to avoid a robot in comparison with avoiding another human. Humans prefer to give the way to the robot even when they are likely to pass first at the beginning of the interaction.