Personal Space Intrusion in Human-Robot Collaboration

Abstract

Our research aims toward a method of evaluating how invasion of personal space by a robot, with appropriate social context, affects human comfort. We contribute an early design of a testbed to evaluate how comfort changes because of invasion of personal space by a robot during a collaborative task within a shared workspace. Our testbed allows the robot to reach into the human's personal space at different distances and urgency levels. We present a collaborative task testbed using a humanoid robot and future directions for this work.