SpaCon project is inspired by bodily communication in human-human interaction. Consider, narrow spatial configurations in office buildings and people’s homes (e.g. a doorway, hallway, or a small room).  Humans are well capable in understanding their mutual intentions when they have to negotiate nonverbally their (personal) space around them. In particular, this is the case when interaction partners have to make room for each other in passing by situations, in which one interaction partner blocks the other’s way as there is only space for one person/ robot to pass at a time.
Bodily communication such as spatial prompting (defined by Anders Green 2009) and proxemics (E.T. Hall 1969 and others) are a natural means of communication in human-human interaction, but their presence and role in human-robot interaction (HRI) has so far mostly been investigated regarding hand-gestures and verbal prompts. Whether a person uses body motion to communicate (prompt) spontaneously with a robot and if a robot would be able to make itself understandable has not been investigated on the level of interaction.

Research questions within the scenario’s scope are:

To answer these questions, two human-robot interaction studies were conducted with the following robots:

BIRON (=BIelefeld Robot companiON)
Composition of GuiaBot and PatrolBot by MobileRobots; so far used 180° laser rangefinder  to detect people automatically.
Description of study: Spatial Bottleneck – hallway
BIRON was used in an exploratory study, which was conducted, to find out, which behavior the most appropriate passing strategy is and how participants express their wish to pass-by.
BIRON blocked the way in a corridor at Bielefeld University and initiated a variety of defensive and more offensive passing strategies towards approaching persons. 59 participants took part. The data of an external camera and questionnaire form the corpus which is analyzed.

Snoopy (LTH, Lund University, Sweden): Pioneer P3-DX by MobileRobots; 360° laser coverage used to detect people automatically.
Description of study: Spatial Bottleneck – narrow way out of a room
Snoopy took part in a qualitative and exploratory study. 32 participants had to guide the robot around three rooms in an office environment. The scenario of interest, implicitly created here, was a situation in which the robot blocked the way out of the room: the participant navigated the robot unknowingly between themselves and the door frame in order to show the printer and other items in the printer room. The guiding study was conducted to observe, describe and classify spontaneous and communicational body movements from a human toward a robot in a blocking situation.
The corpus to analyze consists of laser data (person and robot, questionnaire data before and after the run and video data of an external camera and an onboard camera.

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