A preliminary model for comfortable approach distance based on environmental conditions and personal factors

Abstract

Abstract-This paper presents a model of "comfortable distance" that captures the factors and conditions known to affect personal space in human-human and human-robot interactions, as well as any identified relationships between them. In the first known human-robot interaction (HRI) survey on approach distance, 19 papers were reviewed and the "comfortable distance" model was synthesized with three distinct types of inputs: environmental conditions, personal factors, and agent factors. Five environmental conditions (lighting, ceiling height, indoor/outdoor, room size, and barrier height) and seven personal factors (gender, age, mood, personality, pet ownership, robot experience, and sitting/standing) structure the model, with four agent factors (angle of approach, height of agent, speed of approach, and gaze) used as tuning parameters to produce behaviors with appropriate distances. Currently, HRI researchers generally focus on one factor at a time (e.g., approach angle or approach speed), without considering the previous work in adjacent fields, such as psychology and other social sciences. This has resulted in environmental factors being ignored by the HRI community. The "comfortable distance" model is a new tool for HRI researchers and is expandable so that it can incorporate new factors as they are identified. This survey will inform researchers about factors which had been previously overlooked in the field of HRI and will allow future researchers to consider the impact of identified variables to create more complete experiments.

A Cloud Robotics Solution to Improve Social Assistive Robots for Active and Healthy Aging

“…In the literature, the opportunity to know the position and pose of the users, as well as the environmental conditions where the robots and humans interact, were considered crucial information for implementing socially believable robot behaviors [39], improve the robot's proxemity and the user's comfort in using the robot [40,41].…”

“…The information required to provide such services could come from wearable and environmental sensors as well as distributed intelligent agents such as are described in Table 1 according to the networked robotics paradigm and [35,40].…”

“…If a human-robot interaction occurs during the service, the HRIM retrieves all the necessary data from the cloud DB on the user and the environment to estimate the proper robot proxemics. For each service concerning interaction with a human, the robot could be directed to the human at a different speed and positioned at a specific distance and orientation, depending on the user's position and posture, the dimensions of the room and the lightning conditions as suggested in [40,41]. GUI The GUI consisted of a Web application for remote home monitoring and the supervision of the users locations.…”