What Will It Take to Help a Stuck Robot? Exploring Signaling Methods for a Mobile Robot

Our everyday living environment is created for people. When mobile robots negotiate this space, they might get stuck on hard to solve obstacles thus requiring people's help. The robot will need to persuade passers-by to assist it in overcoming these obstacles to reduce the need for maintenance interventions, which can be costly. In our study, we enabled a mobile robot to communicate its need for assistance in multiple ways, including beeping, synthesized voice and movement. These behaviors were tested in combination, to ascertain which is the most effective. We found that the robot which communicates being stuck using movement and voice gets the most help, while static, beeping and silent robots get much less help. However, subjective data shows that people might feel even more empathy towards the robot expressing its problem by beeping compared to using spoken messages.