Communicating robot intentions: Usability study of a socially-aware mobile robot

Mobile robots need to understand human actions and produce socially accepted behaviors. In this paper, we address this issue and propose a method for mobile robots to communicate their intentions to humans. We also recognize the need for robots to move in a social manner by respecting the personal space of humans and not interrupting their interactions with other people or objects in the environment. We present a retrofitted MiR100 equipped with an RGB-D camera and a video projector. The RGB-D camera is used in human-aware navigation to recognize humans and predict their trajectories so as for the robot to react proactively to human actions, creating a safe and seamless human-robot collaboration. Here, the video projector acts as a communication channel between the robot and humans, as it transmits the robot’s motion intentions. In order to evaluate the robot’s ability to communicate its intentions, we performed extensive human-centered HRI experiments where 30 participants interacted with the robot integrated with socially aware navigation and a video projector. Our experiments demonstrated that the social acceptance of the mobile robot was favored by the use of human-aware navigation and its combination with the video projector raised the mobile robot’s usability and comfort by 6% and 12%, respectively.