Analysis of gaze information on actual pedestrian behavior in open space — Which body part of an oncoming pedestrian do people gaze at?

The major target of this research is to study the design guidelines for a mobile robot that allows people to easily recognize the direction of movement of the robot in the scenes where a person and a robot pass each other. In general, the design of a robot that coexists with people often incorporates the human movement and the sensory characteristics in order to let the robot behave like a human. This study also adopts this methodology and take into account the human behavioral characteristics so that a person can easily recognize the moving direction of the robot. Therefore, in this paper, we take up the scene where person (subject) and person (an oncoming pedestrian) pass each other, and conduct the experiment to clarify that how the subject passes each other by focusing on how the subject estimates the moving direction of the oncoming pedestrian and which body part of the oncoming pedestrian the subject observes. In this experiment, using the gaze measurement system, we analyzed the gaze region and transition of the subject in the period immediately before passing each other. As a result, it was found that in the period just before people passed each other, the subjects watched an oncoming pedestrians' chest. From the gaze transition every 0.1 seconds, it also turned out that the variances of their line of sight is small. By these results, it was found that the gaze of the subjects who passed each other is focused on the others' chest and its vicinity.