Abstract-Mobile robot companions are service robots that are mobile and designed to share our living space. For such robots, mobility is essential and their coexistence with humans adds new aspects to the mobility issue: the first one is to obtain appropriate motion and the second one is interaction through motion. We encapsulate these two aspects in the term Human-Robot Motion (HRM) with reference to Human-Robot Interaction. The long-term issue is to design robot companions whose motions, while remaining safe, are deemed appropriate from a human point of view. This is the key to the acceptance of such systems in our daily lives. The primary purpose of this paper is to explore how the psychological concept of attention can be taken into account in HRM. To that end, we build upon an existing model of attention that computes an attention matrix that describes how the attention of each person is distributed among the different elements, persons and objects, of his/her environment. Using the attention matrix, we propose the novel concept of attention field that can be viewed as an attention predictor. Using different case studies, we show how the attention matrix and the attention field can be used in HRM.

Let Human-Robot Motion (HRM) denote the study of how robots should move among people, the work presented herein explores to what extent human attention can be useful to address HRM. To that end, a computational model of the human visual attention is proposed to estimate how a person's attentional resources are distributed among the elements in their environment. Based on this model, the concept of attention field for a robot is used to define different attentional properties for the robot's motions such as distraction or surprise. The relevance of the attentional properties for HRM are demonstrated on a proofof-concept acceptable motion planner on various case studies where a robot is assigned different tasks. It is shown how to compute motions that are non-distracting and non-surprising, but also motions that convey the robot's intention to interact with a person.