Influence of legibility on perceived safety in a virtual human-robot path crossing task

Abstract

Abstract-In the future robots will more and more enter our daily life. If we want to increase their acceptance it is necessary that people feel safe in the surrounding of robots. As a prerequisite we think that the robot's behavior has to be legible in order to achieve such a feeling of perceived safety. With our present experiment we assess the perceived safety participants feel when an autonomous robot is crossing their path in a video based virtual scenario watched in first person perspective. The robot is moving with two different navigation algorithms which allows us to test whether the legibility has an influence on the perceived safety and whether the two navigation algorithms differ regarding their resulting legibility and thus perceived safety. Results show that legibility as defined here increases perceived safety of both navigation methods while the level of perceived safety differs between them.

Social Navigation - Identifying Robot Navigation Patterns in a Path Crossing Scenario

“…A robot has to navigate through spaces where humans live and as Althaus et al [1] already stated "The quality of the movements influences strongly the perceived intelligence of the robotic system.". The way a robot moves affects not only the perceived intelligence, also the perceived safety, comfort and legibility and other factors regarding social acceptance [7,17]. Therefore, one goal in human-robot interaction is to develop methods in order to make robot behavior and in particular navigation socially acceptable [16,8,22].…”

“…Therefore, imitating human behavior becomes difficult. Furthermore we showed in former experiments [17] that the legibility and perceived safety of the Human-Aware Navigation method [15] is rather low. In addition, it is not clearly known if humans expect robots to move in a different manner to humans.…”

Be a robot! Robot navigation patterns in a path crossing scenario

“…A prerequisite for the acceptance of robots in everyday situations is that they move naturally and predictably and that humans feel safe. Several approaches have been proposed to make robot navigation socially acceptable [1]- [3] and Lichtenthäler et al [4] showed in their experiments that the legibility and perceived safety of common navigation methods are rather low. However, there is currently no understanding of what humans expect from the navigation capabilities of a robot, in particular how it should behave in dynamic situations when the paths of humans and robots cross.…”

Heuristic Decision-Making for Human-aware Navigation in Domestic Environments

“…The situation can change quickly, obstacles may not be on the map, either because they move themselves (like people or pets or other household robots) or because they are movable (like chairs). Relying too much on path planning in dynamic environments leads to illegible 1 behavior [11,14]. On the positive side, rooms are usually furnished in a way to make navigation easy for people and thus hardly contain dead ends.…”

“…It remains to be tested in dynamic environments, which allow for a much higher variance of situations. Typical navigation algorithms such as the ones implemented in ROS behave different in crossing situations than people [11,2] and are not really legible [14].…”