K-TAVO: A robot behaviour management module to urge a human to avoid

In many companies and laboratories, a variety of robots have been developed. There are already some humanoid robots taking a practical role within our society. When robots move, it is necessary to consider the obstacle avoidance problem. Existing studies of obstacle avoidance, however, do not consider the case that results when humans stand in and occupy the robot's intended path, which make it impossible for the robot to pass. To make humans get out of the robot's way, we propose that a robot expresses its intention while performing obstacle avoidance by using utterances and gestures. We designed a module called K-tavo that triggers robot's utterance and gesture and urges humans to avoid the robot. The experiment showed that utterance can convey robots' intention to want humans to avoid. In addition, gestures can let humans understand more easily which side to avoid.