Proxemics and performance: Subjective human evaluations of autonomous sociable robot distance and social signal understanding

An objective of an autonomous sociable robot is to meet the needs and preferences of a human user. However, this can sometimes be at the expense of the robot's own ability to understand social signals produced by the user. In particular, human preferences of distance (proxemics) to the robot can have significant impact on the performance rates of its automated speech and gesture recognition systems. In this work, we investigated how people perceive a sociable robot based on its performance at different locations. We performed an experiment in which a robot's ability to understand social signals was artificially attenuated across distance; robot maximum, minimum, and average performance rates were also varied. Participants (N = 160) instructed a robot using speech and pointing gestures, and then responded to a questionnaire to provide their subjective evaluations of the robot.We identified significant relationships between robot performance and user perceptions of robot competence, anthropomorphism, engagement, likability, and technology adoption; we identified no relationship between human-robot distance and subjective measures, which contrasts related work. Our results have significant implications for autonomous sociable robot design.