Defining Preferred and Natural Robot Motions in Immersive Telepresence from a First-Person Perspective

This paper presents some early work and future plans regarding how the autonomous motions of a telepresence robot afect a person embodied in the robot through a head-mounted display. We Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed consider the preferences, comfort, and the perceived naturalness of for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation aspects of piecewise linear paths compared to the same aspects on a on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM smooth path. In a user study, thirty-six subjects (eighteen females) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a watched panoramic videos of three diferent paths through a simufee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. lated museum in virtual reality and responded to questionnaires VAM-HRI ’21, March 08–11, 2021, Virtual Conference regarding each path. We found that comfort had a strong efect © 2021 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-x-xxxx-xxxx-x/YY/MM. . . $15.00 on path preference, and that the subjective feeling of naturalness VAM-HRI ’21, March 08–11, 2021, Virtual Conference Mimnaugh, et al. also had a strong efect on path preference, even though people consider diferent things as natural. We describe a categorization of the responses regarding the naturalness of the robot’s motion and provide a recommendation on how this can be applied more broadly. Although immersive robotic telepresence is increasingly being used for remote education, clinical care, and to assist people with disabilities or mobility complications, the full potential of this technology is limited by issues related to user experience. Our work addresses these shortcomings and will enable the future personalization of telepresence experiences for the improvement of overall remote communication and the enhancement of the feeling of presence in a remote location.