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Understanding Human Perceptions of Quadruped Robots

This research project sought to gain an understanding of human perceptions of quadruped robots. The study culminated in two publications, (Chonkar et al., 2022) and (Hauser et al., 2023).

My primary role on this project was in implementing a custom perception-action software for the Boston Dynamics Spot that would run during the studies. The software detected participants in hallway using the Azure Kinect Body Tracking SDK and sent control commands to enable the robot to navigate around the participant once they were in close proximity.

The five conditions. For (Chonkar et al., 2022), all five conditions were used. For (Hauser et al., 2023), only the Autonomous and Leashed conditions were used so that a more conscise hypothesis could be tested.

View demo of the software below - this was taken with an Azure Kinect camera that we mounted for an overhead view of the hallway:

I prepared a poster and presented this work at the Undergraduate Research Forum at the University of Texas at Austin.

References

2023

  1. " What’s That Robot Doing Here?": Perceptions Of Incidental Encounters With Autonomous Quadruped Robots
    Elliott Hauser, Yao-Cheng Chan, Parth Chonkar, and 8 more authors
    In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, 2023

2022

  1. Look to my lead: How does a leash affect perceptions of a quadruped robot?
    Parth Chonkar, Geethika Hemkumar, Huihai Wang, and 9 more authors
    In at the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)., 2022