Study on the comfort of people in spatial interactions with a social robot

Abstract

In this work, it was verified how spatial interaction affects human comfort through experiments in simulated and real environments with 20 volunteers in everyday situations. Interactions were observed taking into account a non-social and a social behavior of the robot. Metrics were used to assess task completeness, occurrence of collisions, invasion of interaction space, spatial and temporal coefficients in robot navigation, in addition to respect for proxemics, verification of movement smoothness and questionnaires to assess the comfort of the volunteers. The study concludes that the social navigation proposed in this work manages to deal with social interactions in a satisfactory way for humans and aspects such as noise produced by the robot and familiarity with the robot’s behavior have great influence on user comfort.