  People are proficient at communicating their intentions in order to avoid
conflicts when navigating in narrow, crowded environments. In many situations
mobile robots lack both the ability to interpret human intentions and the
ability to clearly communicate their own intentions to people sharing their
space. This work addresses the second of these points, leveraging insights
about how people implicitly communicate with each other through observations of
behaviors such as gaze to provide mobile robots with better social navigation
skills. In a preliminary human study, the importance of gaze as a signal used
by people to interpret each-other's intentions during navigation of a shared
space is observed. This study is followed by the development of a virtual agent
head which is mounted to the top of the chassis of the BWIBot mobile robot
platform. Contrasting the performance of the virtual agent head against an LED
turn signal demonstrates that the naturalistic, implicit gaze cue is more
easily interpreted than the LED turn signal.
