Do robots that keep to one side make people walk on it, or jam the corridor?
research/society-plaza
Do robots that keep to one side make people walk on it, or jam the corridor? In a social-force corridor, robots that adapt change nothing, but robots that hold the left cut people's speed from 0.91 to 0.39 of desired by 30% of the crowd and halve lane separation, while people move to their side only gradually (no sharp tipping, unlike the 1D model). Stylised.
What it found
The 1D society-robotnorms passing-side model rebuilt as a social-force corridor (60 simulated walkers, 30 m × 6 m). Robots that adapt to people change nothing. Robots that hold the left slow people from 0.91 to 0.81 of desired speed at 5% of the crowd and to 0.39 at 30%, halve the lane separation (2.75 m to 1.43 m), and move people to their side only gradually (at most 54% of people at memory 9), with no sharp tipping in 300 s. Includes a seeded browser replay. Stylised: 8 seeds, one parameter set, simulated walkers only.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
More in Robot societies among people
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All 31 Robot societies among people projects →
Other research topics
Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1
Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.