Robot Shape Design to Easily Recognize Robots' Movement for Human

The ultimate goal of this research is to develop the design guidelines for a mobile robot that allows people to easily recognize its movement direction in the scenes where a person and a robot pass each other. In general, the design of a robot coexisting with people often incorporates the human movement and the sensory characteristics in order to let the robot behave like a human. This study also adopts this methodology and take into account with the human behavioral characteristics so that a person can easily recognize the robot's moving direction. Therefore, in this study, we clarify the characteristics of human appearance and movement in the period immediately before passing each other in case of person to person. By adopting its characteristics, we propose the design guidelines of the mobile robot in the point of view of robot shape and movement. In this paper, we performed the experiments ((1) Which body parts of oncoming pedestrian are often gazed by the other pedestrian? (2) Phase difference of yaw angle of the shoulder and the loins, (3) Impression evaluation to derive the most human like shape) to determine robot shape. As a result, we are elucidated as follows. Results of (1): pedestrians are considered to determine their own avoidance direction by seeing the movement of the upper body of the oncoming pedestrian. (2) The rotation of loins shows phase lead to shoulder in case of angle of walking direction change is shallow, on the contrary the shoulder is phase lead to the loins. (3) The most human like shape is that the width of the upper part of the robot, the width of the middle part and the height of the middle part are intermediate, and the width of the lower part is slightly wide.