How do walkers avoid a mobile robot crossing their way?
This addresses the problem of safe human-robot interaction in shared environments, providing insights for robot navigation, but it is incremental as it builds on existing human obstacle avoidance research.
The study investigated how humans adapt their walking strategies to avoid collisions with a mobile robot compared to another human, finding that humans tend to yield to the robot even when they initially have the right of way.
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.