Can a mobile robot learn from a pedestrian model to prevent the sidewalk salsa?

Pedestrians approaching each other on a sidewalk sometimes end up in an awkward interaction known as the "sidewalk salsa": they both (repeatedly) deviate to the same side to avoid a collision. This provides an interesting use case to study interactions between pedestrians and mobile robots because, in the vast majority of cases, this phenomenon is avoided through a negotiation based on implicit communication. Understanding how it goes wrong and how pedestrians end up in the sidewalk salsa will therefore provide insight into the implicit communication. This understanding can be used to design safe and acceptable robotic behaviour. In a previous attempt to gain this understanding, a model of pedestrian behaviour based on the Communication-Enabled Interaction (CEI) framework was developed that can replicate the sidewalk salsa. However, it is unclear how to leverage this model in robotic planning and decision-making since it violates the assumptions of game theory, a much-used framework in planning and decision-making. Here, we present a proof-of-concept for an approach where a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent leverages the model to learn how to interact with pedestrians. The results show that a basic RL agent successfully learned to interact with the CEI model. Furthermore, a risk-averse RL agent that had access to the perceived risk of the CEI model learned how to effectively communicate its intention through its motion and thereby substantially lowered the perceived risk, and displayed effort by the modelled pedestrian. These results show this is a promising approach and encourage further exploration.