Detecting Emerging Challenges in Social Sidewalk Navigation

Conference paper (2020)
Copyright: © 2020 Jered Vroon, Y. Zhou, Z. Rusak
Social Navigation Urban Robotics Social Signal Processing Emergent Behavior
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Published Date

2020

Language

English

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Abstract

When mobile urban robots will share the sidewalk with people, the resulting interactions can cause unexpected undesirable outcomes to emerge – from people running away scared to people deliberately teasing and harassing such systems. How can we design such AI systems to aptly handle the unexpected? Directly anticipating and/or detecting these kinds of situations will inherently be unreliable; they are unexpected, after all. And yet, there exists a very clear signal for social slip-ups: the emotional response of people. We thus argue that such systems need to be imbued with a capacity to interpret the socio-emotional reactions to their own behavior.