  Mobile robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces such as
shopping malls, airports, and urban sidewalks. Most of these robots are
designed with human-aware motion planning capabilities but are not designed to
communicate with pedestrians. Pedestrians encounter these robots without prior
understanding of the robots' behaviour, which can cause discomfort, confusion,
and delayed social acceptance. In this research, we explore the common
human-robot interaction at a doorway or bottleneck in a structured environment.
We designed and evaluated communication cues used by a robot when yielding to a
pedestrian in this scenario. We conducted an online user study with 102
participants using videos of a set of robot-to-human yielding cues. Results
show that a Robot Retreating cue was the most socially acceptable cue. The
results of this work help guide the development of mobile robots for public
spaces.
