Will I bother here? - A robot anticipating its influence on pedestrian walking comfort

A robot working among pedestrians can attract crowds of people around it, and consequentially become a bothersome entity causing congestion in narrow spaces. To address this problem, our idea is to endow the robot with capability to understand humans´ crowding phenomena. The proposed mechanism consists of three underlying models: a model of pedestrian flow, a model of pedestrian interaction, and a model of walking comfort. Combining these models a robot is able to simulate hypothetical situations where it navigates between pedestrians, and anticipate the degree to which this would affect the pedestrians´ walking comfort. This idea is implemented in a friendly-patrolling scenario. During planning, the robot simulates the interaction with pedestrian crowd and determines the best path to roam. The result of a field experiment demonstrated that with the proposed method the pedestrians around the robot perceived better walking comfort than pedestrians around the robot that only maximized its exposure.