“Bad Idea, Right?” Exploring Anticipatory Human Reactions for Outcome Prediction in HRI

Humans have the ability to anticipate what will happen in their environment based on perceived information. Their anticipation is often manifested as an externally observable behavioral reaction, which cues other people in the environment that something bad might happen. As robots become more prevalent in human spaces, robots can leverage these visible anticipatory responses to assess whether their own actions might be "a bad idea?" In this study, we delved into the potential of human anticipatory reaction recognition to predict outcomes. We conducted a user study wherein 30 participants watched videos of action scenarios and were asked about their anticipated outcome of the situation shown in each video ("good" or "bad"). We collected video and audio data of the participants reactions as they were watching these videos. We then carefully analyzed the participants’ behavioral anticipatory responses; this data was used to train machine learning models to predict anticipated outcomes based on human observable behavior. Reactions are multimodal, compound and diverse, and we find significant differences in facial reactions. Model performances are around 0.5-0.6 test accuracy, and increase notably when nonreactive participants are excluded from the dataset. We discuss the implications of these findings and future work. This research offers insights into improving the safety and efficiency of human-robot interactions, contributing to the evolving field of robotics and human-robot collaboration.