PARSNiP: A Novel Dataset for Better Perceived Appropriateness Detection in Robot Social Navigation with Emotional and Attentional Features

Abstract Despite advancements in socially aware navigation, robots still often behave inappropriately in social environments. To ensure successful application, robots must detect the human perceived appropriateness of their navigation behaviors. This paper presents a novel dataset covering a complete range of perceived appropriateness and uniquely incorporates human emotion and attention to facilitate the detection of perceived appropriateness of robot social navigation in pathways (PARSNiP). It is created based on a series of human-robot interaction experiments with 30 participants and a mobile robot. Several typical machine learning models are utilized to evaluate the dataset and analyze the contributions of different features in detecting perceived appropriateness. The results indicate that incorporating emotional and attentional features can significantly improve the accuracy of perceived appropriateness detection. There was an increase from 63% to 68% using algorithm-predicted emotional and attentional features, and a further increase to 79% with the emotion and attention data reported by the participants. With the dataset, researchers could train machine learning models to enable robots to detect perceived appropriateness accurately, fostering adaptations that improve their responsiveness and accuracy in social interactions. The dataset is available for download at https://github.com/duibcuiegiosahxois/PARSNiP.git , and videos will be shared upon request by contacting Y.Zhou-13@tudelft.nl.