A Field Observation of Incidental Human-Robot Encounters in Public

Abstract

Following the development of artificial intelligence, robots are becoming more and more autonomous and increasingly used in public settings, and naturally, with the phenomenon comes new types of human-robot interactions (HRI), such as incidental Human-Robot encounters (HRE). As an emerging research area of HRI, HRE extends and broadens the work of HRI by exploring how users and non-users react to a robot that they incidentally encounter. The present paper reports the results of a work-in-progress project that aims to enrich this field by conducting a field observation of how pedestrians or passersby react to a quadruped robot when the robot is seeking assistance from them in order to enter a building. The findings from the observation provide insights into how robots can be designed to integrate with the human world more smoothly.