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Design of a Parametric Model of Personal Space for Robotic Social Navigation

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Abstract

The design of socially acceptable behaviours is becoming one major issue for the development of robots that are able to interact with humans in unconstrained environments. In particular, social behaviours such as gazing, mutual positioning or gesturing allow robots to initiate and maintain an information exchange with humans. This paper focuses on (1) the study of mutual positioning between a small humanoid robot and a person through two psychometric experiments and (2) the design of a parametric model of the personal space based on the results of the two experiments. Results suggest that human–human interpersonal distances are shorter than human–robot interpersonal distances during a communication exchange, at least for the small humanoid robot used in our experiments. We also found that participants evaluate different directions of approach in a significantly different way.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results is part of the KSERA project (http://www.ksera-project.eu) and has received funding from the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) for Research and Technological Development under grant agreement No. 2010-248085. The authors gratefully acknowledge the work done by James Loma, Joey and Richie Baten, Frank Basten, Jiri Fajta and Jan Roelof de Pijper.

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  1. Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences, Human-Technology Interaction Group, Eindhoven University of Technology, Den Dolech 2, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Elena Torta, Raymond H. Cuijpers & James F. Juola

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  1. Elena Torta
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  2. Raymond H. Cuijpers
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  3. James F. Juola
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Correspondence to Elena Torta.

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Torta, E., Cuijpers, R.H. & Juola, J.F. Design of a Parametric Model of Personal Space for Robotic Social Navigation. Int J of Soc Robotics 5, 357–365 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-013-0188-9

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