Experiments with human subjects

To evaluate how well our method behaves around humans, we also conduct additional experiments with ten human subjects. We recruited ten subjects from among graduate students, visiting scholars, and staffs on campus. We consider the balance to be as diverse in gender (5 male, 5 female), professional (6 student, 4 non-student), and origin (4 North America, 4 Asia, 1 Europe, 1 Latin America) as possible.

We asked the subjects to walk through the space during a robotic navigation trial. Subjects were not told which method was being used for each trial. After each experiment, subjects were asked qualitative questions with a 5-point Likert scale: (1) was the robot motion intrusive? (2) was the robot friendly and natural? (3) did the robot motion feel smooth? (4) did the robot pre-emptively move out of your way?

Here, we show the answer for four questions and some example videos when having experiments with human subjects.

Fig.  Evaluation of socialness by human rating. The height of each bar indicates the mean and the range line indicates the standard deviation. Larger is better in all ratings. * indicates statistical significance of our method on the t-test.

our_cath.mp4

Our method

residualRL_cath.mp4

Residual RL

Female A

sacson_cath.mp4

SACSoN with finetune

our_ami.mp4

Our method

residualRL_ami.mp4

Residual RL

Female B

sacson_ami.mp4

SACSoN with finetune

our_pranav.mp4

Our method

residualRL_pranav.mp4

Residual RL

Male A

sacson_pranav.mp4

SACSoN with finetune

our_toru.mp4

Our method

residualRL_toru.mp4

Residual RL

Female C

sacson_toru.mp4

SACSoN with finetune

our_boy2.mp4

Our method

residualRL_boy2.mp4

Residual RL

Male B

sacson_boy2.mp4

SACSoN with finetune

our_girl.mp4

Our method

residualRL_girl.mp4

Residual RL

Female D

sacson_girl.mp4

SACSoN with finetune

our_roxana.mp4

Our method

residualRL_roxana.mp4

Residual RL

Female E

sacson_roxana.mp4

SACSoN with finetune