Context-Confrontation: Elicitation and Exploration of Conflicts for Delivery Robots on Sidewalks

Delivery robots are being deployed on sidewalks, but do we actually know which conflicts we should aim to avoid in the design and creation of these systems? Current approaches to social navigation focus on implementing well-established social norms such as proxemics, but it is dubious if these norms are sufficiently applicable to the context of dynamic interactions between such robots and pedestrians.
We argue that, to get rich insight in the actual conflicts, we should confront them within their context. Based on this argument, we outline a new method for user observation that aims to elicit and explore representative social conflicts by ignoring humans: context-confrontation.
Our first preliminary observations using this method suggest unexpected and novel conflicts, well outside of what current approaches seem to be focusing on – perhaps we, the designers/engineers of these robotic systems, should get out there a bit more, to find the conflicts that really matter.