Findings are presented from a Human Robot Interaction (HRI) Demonstration Trial where attendees approached a stationary mechanical looking robot to a comfortable distance. Instructions were given to participants by the robot using either a high quality male, a high quality female, a neutral synthesized voice, or by the experimenter (no robot voice). Approaches to the robot with synthesized voice were found to induce significantly further approach distances. Those who had experienced a previous encounter with the robot tended to approach closer to the robot. Possible reasons for this are discussed.

Care issues and costs associated with an increasing elderly population are becoming a major concern for many countries. The use of assistive robots in “smart-home” environments has been suggested as a possible partial solution to these concerns. A challenge is the personalization of the robot to meet the changing needs of the elderly person over time. One approach is to allow the elderly person, or their carers or relatives, to make the robot learn activities in the smart home and teach it to carry out behaviors in response to these activities. The overriding premise being that such teaching is both intuitive and “nontechnical.” To evaluate these issues, a commercially available autonomous robot has been deployed in a fully sensorized but otherwise ordinary suburban house. We describe the design approach to the teaching, learning, robot, and smart home systems as an integrated unit and present results from an evaluation of the teaching component with 20 participants and a preliminary evaluation of the learning component with three participants in a human-robot interaction experiment. Participants reported findings using a system usability scale and ad-hoc Likert questionnaires. Results indicated that participants thought that this approach to robot personalization was easy to use, useful, and that they would be capable of using it in real-life situations both for themselves and for others.

We present results from an empirical study investigating the effect of embodiment and minimal gestures in an interactive drumming game consisting of an autonomous child-sized humanoid robot (KASPAR...

This study investigated the relationship between individual differences and proxemic behaviour in an HRI setting involving a robot approaching a person. In total 33 participants took part in three different scenarios; verbal interaction, physical interaction and no interaction. Participant control over the robot, and approach direction was also varied. Measurements of the preferred robot approach distance was obtained, and analysed along with the participants' demographic and personality data. The results indicate differences in approach direction preferences based on gender. Also, results show that the participants' personality traits of extraversion and conscientiousness are associated with changes in approach distance preferences according to robot autonomy. The results are discussed in light of relevant literature from the social sciences.

The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a user. Our present study consisted of two parts. Firstly, we carried out a large-scale survey trying to identify the internal structure between users’ different social role expectations and the relationships between these and users’ technology usage. Results from this study led to the development of a measure for preferred robot social roles. In the second part, this measure was used in a live human–robot interaction (HRI) study in a home setting, designed to create a baseline understanding of human–robot Proxemics approach directions and distances for a Care-O-bot \(^{\circledR }\) 3 based on these roles. In order to support users interpretation of the robots intentions in those tasks, the HRI studies used a simple LED light display panel. Findings indicate that, participants were comfortable with the robot approaching to the closest implemented distance (0.5 m). For the task requiring relatively more coordination, participants preferred the robot to approach from the front to a larger extent than for tasks requiring less coordination. The ability to identify the signals from the LED display also impacted how participants evaluated the robots behaviour. Users who had previous experience of interacting with robots differentiated less between approaches, and also evaluated tasks requiring more coordination with the robot more favourably. The findings in the short-term sample were strongly influenced by expectations as to the social role expectation they had of the robot, suggesting that social expectations impact proxemic interactions even if the robot platform is clearly not humanoid.