Towards civil inattention through gaze for social robot navigation scenarios

For service robots, navigation extends beyond simply reaching their destination to sharing the space with humans who are differently engaged with the robot’s task, ranging from the intended recipients of the service to uninvolved bystanders. Robots must therefore exhibit socially appropriate behaviors that facilitate harmonious human–robot coexistence by making their intentions and goals legible to nearby people. Informed by sociological studies of human–human interaction in shared public spaces, we propose to equip service robots with the social mechanism of Civil Inattention, through which individuals acknowledge one another’s presence while signaling non-intrusiveness via brief glances or other minimal cues. We propose a gaze-based mechanism in which the robot briefly directs its gaze toward a nearby human and adapts its navigation policy based on the human’s gaze response. If mutual gaze is detected through a binary head pose trigger, the robot averts its gaze and continues with a standard navigation policy; otherwise, the robot adopts a more conservative motion strategy upon a certain distance to human, assuming it was not detected by the bystander. In this paper, we present the core ideas behind the proposed mechanism, rooting them in the relevant literature, and providing a plan for implementation and evaluation, including foreseeable pitfalls and limitations.