Sound-First Social Navigation: Auditory Intent Displays That Shape Human Motion

Orthmann et al. (2023, THRI) show that layered audio can communicate robot size, speed, availability, urgency, and directionality in unintentional HRI. Mavrogiannis et al. (2019, HRI) demonstrate that robot navigation strategies affect human motion (e.g., acceleration) and challenge assumptions about teleoperation being preferred. This project unifies these ideas: design and test real-time auditory intent displays that actively modulate human flow around a robot—communicating near-term path, yielding behavior, and availability—then quantify effects on human kinematics (e.g., speed, clearance, acceleration) in crowded, controlled studies akin to Mavrogiannis et al. We explicitly study “unexpected” sound events (e.g., urgency spikes) as control inputs that nudge human behavior and evaluate affective responses (drawing on Rehm & Krogsager, 2013) and perceived interaction quality (Mizuchi et al., 2023). This challenges the visual-first assumption in social navigation by making sound a primary, not auxiliary, communication channel—especially useful in occluded, low-visibility, or attention-limited settings. We will also explore age-sensitive variants for public spaces that include children (Wróbel et al., 2023). Impact: design guidelines and algorithms for auditory legibility in robots that co-exist with people, potentially reducing collisions and improving comfort without relying solely on gaze or display screens.

References:

1. Age-Appropriate Robot Design: In-The-Wild Child-Robot Interaction Studies of Perseverance Styles and Robot’s Unexpected Behavior. Alicja Wróbel, Karolina Źróbek, Marie-Monique Schaper, Paulina Zguda, B. Indurkhya (2023). IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.
2. Negative affect in human robot interaction — Impoliteness in unexpected encounters with robots. M. Rehm, Anders Krogsager (2013). 2013 IEEE RO-MAN.
3. Designing Evaluation Metrics for Quality of Human-Robot Interaction in Guiding Human Behavior. Y. Mizuchi, Yusuke Tanno, T. Inamura (2023). International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction.
4. Effects of Distinct Robot Navigation Strategies on Human Behavior in a Crowded Environment. Christoforos Mavrogiannis, A. Hutchinson, J. Macdonald, Patrícia Alves-Oliveira, Ross A. Knepper (2019). IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
5. Sounding Robots: Design and Evaluation of Auditory Displays for Unintentional Human-robot Interaction. Bastian Orthmann, Iolanda Leite, R. Bresin, Ilaria Torre (2023). ACM Trans. Hum. Robot Interact..