| dc.description.abstract | In recent years a growing number of companies started pilot projects with delivery robots. Previous research on
pedestrian-robot interaction has looked at, for instance, the effect of robot velocity and anthropomorphism on pedestrian
behavior towards a robot, as well as people’s ethical concerns towards these robots. However, little is known about what
effect a clearly conveyed function of a robot has on behavior towards this robot. Therefore, a field study was done where
observations of pedestrians encountering a stationary mobile robot without a clear function were compared to observations
of pedestrians encountering a stationary Garbage cleaning robot. We found that, for pedestrians that encountered the
Garbage bot, the chance of ignoring that robot was higher compared to pedestrians encountering the robot with no
clear function. An additional finding was that women are more likely to ignore a mobile robot compared to men. The
findings have emphasized that companies would benefit from ensuring that their robot conveys a clear function. The clear
conveyance of the robot’s function decreases the likelihood of pedestrians interfering with the robot’s tasks. In addition, it
decreases the chance of pedestrians getting distracted by the mobile robot, therewith increasing overall road safety. Future
studies could conduct experiments with an autonomously driving robot, rather than a stationary one. These studies could
aim to investigate the behavior of the demographic groups for which the current study did not provide enough data, as
well as investigate how behavior towards mobile robots changes over time. | |
