May I Talk about Other Shops Here? Modeling Territory and Invasion in Front of Shops

This paper models the concept of the “territory” of shops. First, we interviewed three shopkeepers and found that they perceived the space near their shop as their territory and that they interpreted some types of behaviors as invasive. Second, we confirmed that potential visitors share this notion of territory. We also confirmed that the size of the territory depends on the characteristics of a shop's facade. While there is little territory in front of walls, there is more territory in front of shelves and entrances. Our robot traversed around two real shopping malls that included 50 shops and took 3-D scans of their environment shapes. Each shop's facade was analyzed and the shop territory was computed. The computation results match people's perception. The recognition rate accuracy reached 93.5% for the territory areas. User evaluations in a virtual shop environment confirmed that a robot with a territory model behaves better than one without it.