A long-term Human-Robot Proxemic study

Abstract

Abstract-A long-term Human-Robot Proxemic (HRP) study was performed using a newly developed Autonomous Proxemic System (APS) for a robot to measure and control the approach distances to the human participants. The main findings were that most HRP adaptation occurred in the first two interaction sessions, and for the remaining four weeks, approach distance preferences remained relatively steady, apart from some short periods of increased distances for some participants. There were indications that these were associated with episodes where the robot malfunctioned, so this raises the possibility of users trust in the robot affecting HRP distance. The study also found that approach distances for humans approaching the robot and the robot approaching the human were comparable, though there were indications that humans preferred to approach the robot more closely than they allowed the robot to approach them in a physically restricted area. Two participants left the study prematurely, stating they were bored with the repetitive experimental procedures. This highlights issues related to the often incompatible demands of keeping experimental controlled conditions vs. having realistic, engaging and varied HRI trial scenarios.

Learning how to increase the chance of human-robot engagement

“…There are some implicit nonverbal social rules that must the respected in this case, especially those concerning people's personal spaces (called proxemics). As previously works have shown [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], the same proxemic zones that exists in human-human interaction can also be applied to human-robot interaction scenarios. Considering this, some works incorporate this personal space model in the path planning step [14], [15], [16].…”

Personal Space Intrusion in Human-Robot Collaboration

“…Rather than measuring the distance at which a robot should stop approaching a human, we are defining a context for the invasion of personal space: a collaborative task that requires a human and a robot to interact inside the comfortable "stop" distance described in [18].…”

Task-centric selection of robot and environment initial configurations for assistive tasks

“…Several bodies of work have examined the proxemics of human-robot interactions [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. These works look at acceptable interpersonal distances between humans and robots in social settings.…”

“…TCS loads the precomputed scores and runs a brute force optimization on equation (5). (5) where α, β, and γ are gains in the optimization function, adjustable depending on the priorities of the user.…”