Can an approaching robot’s eye movements influence which way people move aside?

Details

The researchers tested whether the eye movements people use to signal a passing direction could also work for robots. In the first experiment, 92 participants from a country where traffic drives on the right watched short videos of approaching figures. When a figure looked to its own left, participants more often chose to move to their own left—a complementary choice that would let the approaching pair pass each other.

The second experiment involved 176 participants from countries where traffic drives on the left. Participants more often chose to move right when the approaching figure looked to its own right, and left when it looked to its own left. The abstract reports a leftward effect in the first experiment and effects in both directions in the second; it does not report the size of these effects.

Neither experiment found a difference in moving-aside behavior between the person, human-shaped robot and delivery robot. That does not prove the figures were equivalent in every respect. The findings suggest that eyes could help robots communicate a passing direction, but the experiments tested responses to videos, not actual encounters or collision rates on sidewalks.