Robot Guide Navigation

Spencer Project

During my master, I was active as a student assistant in the European Spencer project. In research led by dr. Michiel Joosse, we conducted a survey on people’s perceptions of appropriate behavior of a guide robot at an airport. With this study, we have made a first step to investigate people’s beliefs of robot responses in conflict situations in public spaces, in particular airports.

Results suggest that in a variety of conflict situations, people’s belief of the robot’s action was not influenced, which could be interpreted as a permit to deploy robots with a single type of response to an action without taking the context into account. As a first exploration, we captured rich answers by collecting free-text responses, which limited the sample size, partly due to the resource-intense quantification of the qualitative data. This work has been published as a workshop paper, which can be found at this link.