Considering the bystander´s perspective for indirect human-robot interaction

As robots become more pervasive in society, people will find themselves actively interacting with robots, and also rushing past them without any explicit interaction. People are able to maneuver in crowded situations by speeding up or slowing down to slip in between open pockets where people are not standing or walking. Our research focuses on this indirect bystander interaction. Scholtz defines a bystander as a person who "does not explicitly interact with a robot but needs some model of robot behavior to understand the consequences of the robot\´s actions" and does not have formal training about the robot [1], [2]. We investigated the level of trust that a bystander has of a robotic system in a corridor passing scenario by asking people to watch short videos of such scenarios where the hallway is only wide enough to accommodate two entities (either human or robot). Our goal was to understand the bystander\´s mental model of how a robot should behave when passing a human, the bystander\´s expectation of the robot to adhere to social protocol, and the overall trust a bystander has of the robot to do the right thing.