Do You Need Help? A Robot Providing Information to People Who Behave Atypically

In this work, we were interested in creating a robot service for offering help to people who appear to be in need for guidance. In order to achieve that, we first developed a technique to detect pedestrians who walk in an atypical way (e.g., people who do not know their way). In our approach, a motion model of typical pedestrians developed in our previous work was used, and a novel predictability feature was defined that quantifies how well can a person's future position be predicted using that model. The classification method based on this feature gave accurate results and outperformed alternative methods. Using this detection method, we created a robot service for offering guidance to people who were classified as atypical. Experiments done in a shopping mall have shown that the robot was successful in choosing the people to approach, and the reactions from users in the interviews were very positive.