Come Closer: The Effects of Robot Personality on Human Proxemics Behaviours

TL;DR

This study examines how robot personality traits, specifically introversion and extroversion, influence human personal space behaviors in a social robot setting, revealing differences from human-human proxemics.

Contribution

Introduces a robot receptionist with adjustable personality traits and identifies how these traits affect human proxemics, proposing new zones for human-robot interaction.

Findings

Humans maintain shorter distances with introvert robots.

Robot personality influences proxemics behaviors.

Proposed new proxemics zones for human-robot interactions.

Abstract

Social Robots in human environments need to be able to reason about their physical surroundings while interacting with people. Furthermore, human proxemics behaviours around robots can indicate how people perceive the robots and can inform robot personality and interaction design. Here, we introduce Charlie, a situated robot receptionist that can interact with people using verbal and non-verbal communication in a dynamic environment, where users might enter or leave the scene at any time. The robot receptionist is stationary and cannot navigate. Therefore, people have full control over their personal space as they are the ones approaching the robot. We investigated the influence of different apparent robot personalities on the proxemics behaviours of the humans. The results indicate that different types of robot personalities, specifically introversion and extroversion, can influence human proxemics behaviours. Participants maintained shorter distances with the introvert robot receptionist, compared to the extrovert robot. Interestingly, we observed that human-robot proxemics were not the same as typical human-human interpersonal distances, as defined in the literature. We therefore propose new proxemics zones for human-robot interaction.