Keep Distance with a Smile - User Characteristics in Human-Robot Collaboration

In today's production plants, close cooperation between mobile robots and humans is becoming increasingly important. Several research papers have shown that proxemics is a suitable theoretical concept for predicting the distance behavior of humans when cooperating with robots. Our study was conducted within the framework of this concept. However, such studies often only focus on the different characteristics of the robot, so we further investigate the effects of human characteristics on the distance control. As independent variables, we systematically varied the characteristics of a transportation robot (speed, height, emotional expression) and additionally collected the characteristics of our 29 subjects (gender, experience with robots, experience with pets, attitude toward Robots). As a dependent variable, the distance of the subjects to the robot was measured using a motion capture system. Our research hypotheses were formulated based on the proxemics concept. As results show, the distance increases with the size of the robot or decreases with a friendly expression of the robot. In general, our results suggest that both the characteristics of the robot and the characteristics of the human partner influence distance regulation.