No Contact Needed: Humans Adapt Their Gait to Suit Legged Robot Companions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Legged robots companions may one day assist humans with everyday tasks, but their possible impact on human gait is unknown. While previous studies have shown that humans adjust their gait when walking with other humans, it is uncertain whether walking with legged robots would yield similar results. In this study, we measured the gait of healthy participants (N = 14) while they walked alone and with a small quadruped robot. Spatiotemporal and stability gait parameters were calculated to determine whether the presence of the robot affected participants' gait. We found that walking with robots primarily affected measures in the walking direction. Participants walked slower and with altered anterior-posterior stability with the robot, but we did not find significant differences in the mediolateral direction in terms of step width or stability. However, we also observed that variability in the mediolateral distance between the robot and our participants also influenced participant gait behaviour. Our results demonstrate that robots do influence human gait even without physical contact and through seemingly innocuous actions such as walking near them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".