Right of Way, Assertiveness and Social Recognition in HumanRobot Doorway Interaction We expand on previous work for negotiating humanrobot navigation contention around doorways to produce a more sociallycompliant autonomous robot behaviour. Our goal is to improve the integration of robots navigating in human environments by eliciting human recognition of the robotxe2x80x99s right of way. This is achieved by incorporating feedback from a user study of our previous system to create a more communicative, reciprocal, and assertive behaviour. Our contribution includes both the updated behaviour and a new user study that evaluates and compares the system to its predecessor. Results show that participants are more likely to respect the robotxe2x80x99s right of way given the new robot behaviour, but their responses also highlight the challenges of socially integrating robots into human spaces.

Enthusiastic Robots Make Better Contact This paper presents the design and evaluation of humanlike welcoming behaviors for a humanoid robot to draw the attention of passersby by following a threestep model: (1) selecting a target (person) to engage, (2) executing behaviors to draw the targetxe2x80x99s attention, and (3) monitoring the attentive response. A computer vision algorithm was developed to select the person, start the behaviors and monitor the response automatically. To vary the robotxe2x80x99s enthusiasm when engaging passersby, a waving gesture was designed as basic welcoming behavioral element, which could be successively combined with an utterance and an approach movement. This way, three levels of enthusiasm were implemented: Mild (waving), moderate (waving and utterance) and high (waving, utterance and approach movement). The three levels of welcoming behaviors were tested with a Pepper robot at the entrance of a university building. We recorded data and observation sheets from several hundreds of passersby (N 364) and conducted postinterviews with randomly selected passersby (N 28). The level selection was done at random for each participant. The passersby indicated that they appreciated the robot at the entrance and clearly recognized its role as a welcoming robot. In addition, the robot proved to draw more attention when showing high enthusiasm (i.e., more welcoming behaviors), particularly for female passersby.