Can Robots Be Used to Encourage Social Distancing

In this work, we explore whether robots can exert their persuasive influence to encourage others to follow new proxemic norms (i.e., COVID-19 social distancing guidelines). Our results suggest that social robots are not effective for this purpose, and, in fact, when some persuasive strategies are used, this approach might backfire due to novelty effects that encourage pedestrians to approach and cluster around such robots.