Effects of Human Personal Space on the Robot Obstacle Avoidance Be havior: A Human-in-the-loop Assessment

Abstract

To ensure both the physical and mental safety of humans during human-robot interaction (HRI), a rich body of literature has been accumulated, and the notion of socially acceptable robot behaviors has arisen. To be specific, it requires the motion of robots not only to be physically collision-free but also to consider and respect the social conventions developed and enforced in the human social contexts. Among these social conventions, personal space, or proxemics, is one of the most commonly considered in the robot behavioral design. Nevertheless, most previous research efforts assumed that robots could generate human-like motions by merely mimicking a human. Rarely are the robot’s behavioral algorithms assessed and verified by human participants. Therefore, to fill the research gap, a Turing-like simulation test, which contains the interaction of two agents (each agent could be a human or a robot) in a shared space was conducted. Participants (33 in total) were asked to identify and label the category of those agents followed by questionnaires. Results revealed that people who had different attitudes and prior expectations of appropriate robot behaviors responded to the algorithm differently, and their identification accuracy varied significantly. In general, by considering personal space in the robot obstacle avoidance algorithm, robots could demonstrate more humanlike motion behaviors which are confirmed by human experiments.

Human Acceptance of the Cleaning Robot in Grocery Environments During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…More specifically, when their personal space was invaded by the same cleaning robot, the comfort level of participants who had prior knowledge of robotic (mean of the rating = 5.75) was significantly lower than those who did not (mean of the rating = 7.35). The result is in line with our previous finding (Chen et al, 2021), i.e., people who are aware of recent advancements in robotics technology tend to have a higher expectation of robot's behavior, such as taking a detour to respect personal space when encountered with a human agent. This explains why participants who had prior knowledge of robotics had a low spatial comfort when the cleaning robot invaded their personal space (Figure 1a).…”

“…In terms of the factors that affect human acceptance of the cleaning robot, the effects of gender, as well as three other factors adopted from previous literature (Chen et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2021;Strawderman et al, 2017), were tested in this preliminary study. As shown in Table 2, only prior knowledge of robotics (e.g., robot navigation and obstacle avoidance) was observed to have a significant effect on participants' spatial comfort (p = 0.039).…”

“…Each of the questions represents a factor that may affect participants' acceptance of the cleaning robot. The questions are listed as below: These factors were chosen based on our previous research effort (Chen et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2021) and findings from other human-robot interaction (HRI) studies (Strawderman et al, 2017). Subsequently, three videos were given to the participants in a random order.…”

Towards Next Generation Cleaning Tools: Factors Affecting Cleaning Robot Usage and Proxemic Behaviors Design

“…We argue that the inconsistent results may be due to the difference in context, but more importantly, in our study, the role of the robot (i.e., cleaning robot) and its intention (i.e., clean up spills and/or contaminants on the floor) were well delivered to the participants, whereas in Joosse et al, 2013, such information was not specified. In line with our prior works (Chen et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2021), the findings suggest that for the design of the proxemic behavior of cleaning robots, it is necessary to take human personal space into account to make the robot motions more socially acceptable.…”