A Study on Robot-Initiated Interaction: Toward Virtual Social Behavior

Human-like decision-making skills are sought after during the design of social robots. On the one hand, such features enable a robot to be easily handled by its non-expert user. On the other hand, the robot will have the capability of dealing with humans in such a way that the human will not be disturbed by the behavior of the robot. In an effort to introduce proxemics-based etiquettes to a social robot, we have used a teleoperated robot to find human interest in the intelligent proxemic and conversational behavior of a robot. Engagement of humans with a situation-cautious behavior of the robot upon a static approach behavior was examined during the study. During this approach, physiological cues displayed by the humans were used by the robot to perceive an encounter with humans. As the robot approached the subject after analyzing the physiological behavior of the subject, spatial constraints occur due to the movement of the robot could be demolished. Furthermore, utterances generated by the robot to initiate an interaction with the user were decided by predicting the intentions of that individual based on these displayed human cues. Results of the experiment confirm the fact that a more socially acceptable spatial and verbal behavior could be observed from the robot through situation-awareness than a static behavior.