That's on my mind! robot to human intention communication through on-board projection on shared floor space

The upcoming new generation of autonomous vehicles for transporting materials in industrial environments will be more versatile, flexible and efficient than traditional AGVs, which simply follow pre-defined paths. However, freely navigating vehicles can appear unpredictable to human workers and thus cause stress and render joint use of the available space inefficient. Here we address this issue and propose on-board intention projection on the shared floor space for communication from robot to human. We present a research prototype of a robotic fork-lift equipped with a LED projector to visualize internal state information and intents. We describe the projector system and discuss calibration issues. The robot's ability to communicate its intentions is evaluated in realistic situations where test subjects meet the robotic forklift. The results show that already adding simple information, such as the trajectory and the space to be occupied by the robot in the near future, is able to effectively improve human response to the robot.