After You: Doorway Negotiation for Human-Robot and Robot-Robot Interaction

We propose and test an autonomous robot behavior for socially-compliant navigation of doorways with both human and robot interlocutors. Building on previous work for "aggressive" interaction between robots to resolve navigation deadlocks in corridors, we demonstrate an "assertive" robot that negotiates right-of-way when faced with a human or other robot. The negotiation is implemented using only motion and common navigation sensors, without explicit message-passing. Our goal is for the correct agent to take priority, as decided both by time-efficiency and as judged subjectively by naive human participants. Our contribution is a practical method for doorway negotiation, and a study of human users' responses to a robot that appears to participate in existing social customs surrounding doors. Our method is evaluated with robot-robot experiments and a human-robot interaction study with non-expert users.