Crowd sourcing 'approach behavior' control parameters for human-robot interaction

For service robots to be well received in our daily lives, it is desirable that they appear as friendly as possible rather than some unfriendly characters. While a robot's physical appearance influences this perception, its behavior also has an impact. In order to be sure that a specific robot behavior will be correctly perceived, we propose to its potential users to shape the robot's behavior. In this paper, a specific behavior, approaching a person, is evaluated with a Robosoft Kompaï robot. To avoid logistics issues associated with having large groups of novice users performing demonstrations on a physical robot, a web-based approach built around a simulation of the actual robot is proposed. The relationship between the robot and the person is described by the two dimensions of the interpersonal circumplex: Communion (hostile or friendly) and agency (submissive or dominant). The users can adjust three parameters of the approach behavior (i.e., distance, trajectory curvature, and deceleration) in a manner that corresponds the best to the described relationship. An analysis of the data from 69 users is presented, along with a verification experiment done with 10 participants and the real robot. Results suggest that users associate hostile robots with straight trajectories, and submissive robots with smoother deceleration.