Mobile Robot Yielding Cues for Human-Robot Spatial Interaction

Mobile robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces such as shopping malls, airports, and urban sidewalks. Most of these robots are designed with human-aware motion planning capabilities but are not designed to communicate with pedestrians. Pedestrians encounter these robots without prior understanding of the robots’ behaviour, which can cause discomfort, confusion, and delayed social acceptance. In this research, we explore the common human-robot interaction at a doorway or bottleneck in a structured environment. We designed and evaluated communication cues used by a robot when yielding to a pedestrian in this scenario. We conducted an online user study with 102 participants using videos of a set of robot-to-human yielding cues. Results show that a Robot Retreating cue was the most socially acceptable cue. Repeated measures and Friedman’s ANOVAs on components of social acceptability were statistically significant (p = .01) and had small and medium effect sizes (η
p
²
= .04, η
p
²
= .08). The results of this work help guide the development of mobile robots for public spaces.