Right of Way, Assertiveness and Social Recognition in Human-Robot Doorway Interaction

We expand on previous work for negotiating human-robot navigation contention around doorways to produce a more socially-compliant autonomous robot behaviour. Our goal is to improve the integration of robots navigating in human environments by eliciting human recognition of the robot's right of way. This is achieved by incorporating feedback from a user study of our previous system to create a more communicative, reciprocal, and assertive behaviour. Our contribution includes both the updated behaviour and a new user study that evaluates and compares the system to its predecessor. Results show that participants are more likely to respect the robot's right of way given the new robot behaviour, but their responses also highlight the challenges of socially integrating robots into human spaces.