Perceived appropriateness: A novel perspective on remediating
robot inappropriate navigation behavior in narrow passageways
Anonymous Author(s)
ABSTRACT
Robots navigating in social environments inevitably make mistakes,
which they will repeat if not aware of them and hinders their social
acceptance. This highlights the importance of detecting perceived
appropriateness for robots to correct their mistakes, in line with
what we found in a systematic literature review. Therefore, we have
conducted experiments (both outdoor and indoor) to understand
perceived appropriateness of robot social navigation behavior in
narrow environments, based on which we collected a dataset and
developed a machine learning model for detecting such perceived
appropriateness. To further validate the effectiveness of such in-
formation, we plan to conduct a WoZ study with human operators
adapting robot behavior based on people’s feedback. By analyzing
adaptation behavior of human operators, we hope to gain insights
for designing better-suited robot social navigation behavior. Our
research altogether, will reduce and remediate robot mistakes, and
yield higher robot social acceptance.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Human-centered computing → Social navigation; Empirical
studies in interaction design; Interaction design process and methods;
• Computing methodologies → Cognitive robotics.
KEYWORDS
Human-Robot Interaction, Social Navigation, Perceived appropri-
ateness, Social signal processing, Adaptive behavior
ACM Reference Format:
Anonymous Author(s). 2022. Perceived appropriateness: A novel perspec-
tive on remediating robot inappropriate navigation behavior in narrow
passageways. In Proceedings of ACM Conference (Conference’17). ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456
1 INTRODUCTION
As robots increasingly navigate in social environments, they in-
evitably encounter, interact, and even cooperate with people to
achieve their tasks, while at the same time are required to ensure
human safety and comfort such that they can be socially accepted
[6].
To ensure that robots’ navigation behavior are perceived as ap-
propriate by both the general public and interacting individuals,
various models and algorithms have been proposed and applied for
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https://doi.org/10.1145/1122445.1122456
robot social navigation. These include prediction of nearby peo-
ple’s trajectories and planning of robot social navigation behavior
[7, 16], estimating and respecting to people’s dynamic personal
space [12, 15], as well as detecting and responding to people’s
various physical and psychological states (emotion, intention, dom-
inance) [2, 8].
However, current robot social navigation behavior is far from
perfect due to the complexity of social norms, dynamics of human-
robot interactions, and individual differences in perceiving, inter-
preting, and interacting with the robot [11, 13]. Robot cognition is
still at its infancy to understand the environment and how robot
behavior are perceived and affect others [10].
These mistakes/inappropriate behavior could strongly affect
robots’ social acceptance, by correcting of which people’s negative
perception of robots could be compensated, resulting in higher
social acceptance [9].
Yet despite rich research in designing appropriate robot social
navigation behavior, there is limited research in understanding,
detecting, preventing, and correcting inappropriate robot naviga-
tion behavior. Therefore, we have proposed to get a more in-depth
understanding of inappropriate robot social navigation behavior
[14], thus contributing to correcting robot mistakes/inappropriate
behavior for higher robot social acceptance.
2 STUDY
To identify the knowledge gap in robot social navigation, we first
conducted a systematic review, which found importance of per-
ceived appropriateness in Section 2.1. As perceived appropriateness
is most pertinent in the context of (potential) conflicts, we con-
ducted a field study to investigate in detail how conflicts happen, as
well as people’s yielding behavior for robot behavior design (Sec-
tion 2.2). The study enabled us to pinpoint narrow environments
for robot social navigation, where perceived appropriateness are
rich yet has not received much attention. To understand if and how
perceived appropriateness can be detected, we conducted a data
collection in a narrow environment to build a dataset for robots.
Our analysis of the dataset enabled us to identify importance of
emotion and attention in detecting perceived appropriateness (Sec-
tion 2.3). Based on these understandings, we now plan to conduct
a Wizard of Oz study to identify the role of perceived appropri-
ateness in interaction, by exploring ways human operators utilize
such information (Section 2.4), thus drawing inspirations for robot
adaptive behavior design.
2.1 Systematic review: perceived
appropriateness in adapting robot
navigation behavior
Robotic agents are increasingly navigating into our living environ-
ments, yet they often struggle to pick up on and use social cues
like humans do—which hampers their acceptance. We conducted a
Conference’17, July 2017, Washington, DC, USA
systematic literature review (including human-centered work as
well as work on robotic agents) to survey the state of the art with
respect to the following research question: What and how social
cues have been used and for what purposes in social navigation?
For this purpose, we have collected and filtered 437 papers from
sources of Scopus and Web of Science. Across two main application
domains (navigation among pedestrians, and navigation among
vehicles), we identified three roles of social cues; informing pre-
dictions of future states, indicating internal states, and otherwise
signaling cue-related behavior.
Based on understandings of communications between agents, we
found that implicit cues (trajectory, speed, head movements) ensure
efficient communications, while explicit cues contribute to clarity of
interactions. We see an increasing trend of robotic agents processing
and utilizing explicit cues, while perceived appropriateness convey
clearer information about people’s perception of the robot than
emotion and intention, which deserves more attention in the future.
2.2 Field observations of conflicts
To take a close look at perceived appropriateness, we first needed
a clearer understanding of conflicts, where perceived appropriate-
ness of robot navigation behavior typically arise. More specifically,
we needed to understand environmental and dynamical factors of
human-robot interactions that contribute to arising of conflicts, and
how such conflicts are resolved by people to draw inspirations for
robot conflict resolving behavior.
We conducted a field study in which the robot controlled by
human operators navigate in social environments, and investigated
how people respond and yield in conflicts with the robot. We found
that narrow environments is an important factor for robot social
navigation, which triggers much stronger reactions and perception
of the robot than spacious environments, yet has not been well
studied. Besides, from our observations, we also found evidence
suggesting strong correlations between emotion and perceived
appropriateness.
2.3 Data collection and analysis: Detecting
perceived appropriateness of robot social
navigation behavior
We thus took a closer look of human-robot interactions in narrow
environments, in which we designed 8 robot behavior to trigger
a rich range of perceived appropriateness of robot social naviga-
tion behavior. Based on understandings of appraisal theory [4, 5],
social signal processing approaches [3, 9], as well as our previous
observations, we made the assumption that emotion and attention
serve as important intermediate features for detecting perceived
appropriateness. With 31 participants, each interacting with all 8
robot behaviors, we built a dataset of perceived appropriateness
of robot social navigation behavior (1008 datapoints). The dataset
contains computed social cues and collected people’s self-reported
emotion, attention, and perceived appropriateness.
Analysis of the dataset showed that emotion and attention con-
tribute most to detection accuracy of perceived appropriateness
(78.5%) compared with solely social cues (68.0%). Yet our emotion
and attention are collected based on people’s self-report, which is
not accessible in real-life human-robot interactions. Therefore, we
Anon.
detected emotion and attention from social cues as additional input,
and found that despite early exploration of mediocre performance,
detected emotion and attention still contribute to detection of per-
ceived appropriateness (73.4%). Considering rich research already
in human emotion and attention detection, we expect that higher
detection performance of perceived appropriateness can be easily
achieved.
2.4 Effect of perceived appropriateness
information on improving people’s trust
and acceptance of faulty robots
Our first exploration enable us to identify importance of emotion
and attention for detecting perceived appropriateness, yet is still
far from good performance and ready-to-use. Yet we are interested
in how information of perceived appropriateness could be used
by robots to adapt its behavior and improve people’s trust and
acceptance, thus higher social acceptance. Therefore, we plan to
conduct a Wizard of Oz study.
The study will be carried out in narrow environments, in which
the participant and the robot controlled by the operator will make
about 20 encounters with each other. With participants’ self-reported
perceived appropriateness, human operators will adapt robot behav-
ior for better human interaction experience. We will compare three
cases of interactions to identify importance of perceived appro-
priateness and its timing: with information, without information,
and with delayed information. Participants will self-report their
trust and acceptance [1] of robots when confronted with different
cases of robot behavior, based on which results can be compared to
draw conclusions. We will also record human-robot interactions to
analyze in more detail how human operators adapt robot behavior
to inspire robot behavior design.
3 CONCLUSIONS
By reviewing of past literature in robot social navigation, we have
identified importance of perceived appropriateness for avoiding
repeated and continuous robot mistakes and improving robot so-
cial acceptance. We thus conducted a field study of conflicts and
observed rich perceived appropriateness especially in narrow envi-
ronments and with specific robot behavior, where more attention
is needed.
Based on these observations and past literature insights, we
conducted data collection of perceived appropriateness of robot
social navigation behavior, and proved emotion and attention as
important intermediates for detecting perceived appropriateness.
In the future, we plan to conduct a Wizard of Oz study to un-
derstand how information of perceived appropriateness contribute
to people’s trust and acceptance of erroneous robots, and draw
insights for robot behavior design from flexibility and cognitive
decision making from human operators.
Our research contributes to understanding, detecting, and adapt-
ing to conflicting interactions for robot social navigation, thus
preventing robots from making repeated and continuous mistakes,
and increase their social acceptance.

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