Experimental investigation of relationships between anxiety, negative attitudes, and allowable distance of robots

When people interact with robots in daily life, each individual has different attitude and emotion toward the robots, which cause different behavior toward them. Thus, we should empirically investigate influences of attitudes and emotions into human--robot interaction, in particular, those of negative attitudes and anxiety which may directly affect behaviors toward robots. For this aim, an experiment was conducted to investigate relationships between negative attitudes and anxiety toward, and allowable distance of a robot. The results revealed that negative attitudes and anxiety toward robots affected allowable distances between the subjects and the robot, and the subjects' anxiety toward robots changed before and after the experiment session, depending on the robot's behavioral characteristics such as its walking speed.