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Curved Detour Navigation Pilot: Dog Stress Increases Instead

1 reports · 1 sources

Haoxiang Zhang and Nancy Smith published a pilot study testing a dog-welfare-oriented "curved detour" navigation action in real home environments: the robot triggers a lateral arc detour at the dog's alert distance. Contrary to the hypothesis, the curved detour elicited stronger stress responses than the straight-line baseline. The authors attribute this to the execution method: the robot paused multiple times and reoriented to approximate the arc, weakening the action's legibility, and this discontinuity itself became a stressor. The study accordingly proposes that robot behavior legibility for non-humans and proxy stimulus validity are structural challenges in animal-robot interaction. The conclusion comes from a pilot with a single companion dog and a first design iteration; the authors call it a pilot study and did not report validation results from a larger sample.

Report timeline

  1. Robot Navigation and Canine Welfare: A Pilot Study Surfacing Challenges for Cross-Species Legibility and Proxy Validity

    A pilot study in a real home environment evaluated a "curve-out" navigation maneuver for canine welfare: a lateral arcing pass-by trajectory triggered at the dog's alert distance. Contrary to the hypothesis, the maneuver elicited a stronger stress response than a straight-line baseline. The authors argue that the maneuver's discontinuous execution, with the robot stopping and reorienting multiple times to approximate the arc, undermined behavioral legibility, which itself became a stressor. The study thus raises the legibility of robot behavior to non-humans and proxy stimulus validity as structural challenges for animal-machine interaction (AMI).

    arXiv cs.RO ·

Related topics

Human-robot interaction and collaborationSafety and reliabilityResearch papers

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