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Model of Side-by-Side Walking Without the Robot Knowing the Goal

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Abstract

We humans often engage in side-by-side walking even when we do not know where we are going. Replicating this capability in a robot reveals the complications of such daily interactions. We analyzed human–human interactions and found that human pairs sustained a side-by-side walking formation even when one of them (the follower) did not know the destination. When multiple path choices exist, the follower walks slightly behind his partner. We modeled this interaction by assuming that one needs knowledge from the environment, like the locations to which people typically move toward: subgoals. This model enables a robot to switch between two interaction modes; in one mode, it strictly maintains the side-by-side walking formation, and in another it walks slightly behind its partner. We conducted an evaluation experiment in a real shopping arcade and revealed that our model replicates human side-by-side walking better than other simple methods in which the robot simply moves to the side of a person and without the human tendency for choosing the next appropriate subgoals.

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Notes

  1. This paper is an extended version of our preliminary work reported in [17]. The two states model was introduced in this preliminary work. However, while the work in [17] was conducted in a simple indoor corridor with one simple T-shape intersection, this work provides an evidence about the effectiveness of the model in a real shopping mall arcade. For that purpose, we created an algorithm for managing the transition from one state to another based on the estimate of probable subgoals. In addition, the implementation of the robot was fully updated for the use in the real environment.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by JST, CREST. We thank Thomas Kaczmarek, Kanako Tomita and Chao Shi for their help in the realization of field experiments.

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This study was funded by JST, CREST.

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Correspondence to Deneth Karunarathne.

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Karunarathne, D., Morales, Y., Kanda, T. et al. Model of Side-by-Side Walking Without the Robot Knowing the Goal. Int J of Soc Robotics 10, 401–420 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0443-6

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