Mobile Robots and Marching Humans: Measuring Synchronous Joint Action While in Motion

It is challenging to build socially-aware robots due to the inherent uncertainty in the dynamics of human behavior. To become socially-aware, robots need to be capable of recognizing activities in their environment to make informed actions in concert with co-present humans. In this paper, we present and validate an event-based method for robots to detect synchronous and asynchronous actions of humans when working as a team in a human-social environment. Our results suggest that our method is capable of detecting synchronous and asynchronous actions, which a step towards building socially aware robots.