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Perceptual Models of Human-Robot Proxemics

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Experimental Robotics

Part of the book series: Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics ((STAR,volume 109))

Abstract

To enable socially situated human-robot interaction, a robot must both understand and control proxemics—the social use of space—to employ communication mechanisms analogous to those used by humans. In this work, we considered how proxemic behavior is influenced by human speech and gesture production, and how this impacts robot speech and gesture recognition in face-to-face social interactions. We conducted a data collection to model these factors conditioned on distance. This resulting models of pose, speech, and gesture were consistent with related work in human-human interactions, but were inconsistent with related work in human-human interactions—participants in our data collection pos itioned themselves much farther away than has been observed in related work. These models have been integrated into a situated autonomous proxemic robot controller, in which the robot selects interagent pose parameters to maximize its expectation to recognize natural human speech and body gestures during an interaction. This work contributes to the understanding of the underlying per-cultural processes that govern human proxemic behavior, and has implications for the development of robust proxemic controllers for sociable and socially assistive robots situated in complex interactions (e.g., with multiple people or individuals with hearing/visual impairments) and environments (e.g., in which there is loud noise, reverberation, low lighting, or visual occlusion).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows.

  2. 2.

    Our current work considers only dyadic interactions (i.e., interactions between two agents); however, our framework is extensible [9], providing a principled approach (supported by related work [2]) for spatially situated interactions between any number of sociable agents by maximizing how each of them will produce and perceive speech and gestures, as well as any other social signals not considered by this work.

  3. 3.

    https://www.willowgarage.com/pages/pr2/overview.

  4. 4.

    Recall that participants were “strangers” or, at most, “acquaintances”.

  5. 5.

    https://code.google.com/p/usc-interaction-software.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the NSF National Robotics Initiative (IIS-1208500), NSF IIS-1117279 and CNS-0709296 grants, and the PR2 Beta Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Interaction Lab, Computer Science Department, University of Southern California, 3710 McClintock Avenue, RTH 423, Los Angeles, CA, 90089-0781, USA

    Ross Mead & Maja J. Matarić

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  1. Ross Mead
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  2. Maja J. Matarić
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Correspondence to Ross Mead .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    M. Ani Hsieh

  2. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

    Oussama Khatib

  3. Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Vijay Kumar

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Mead, R., Matarić, M.J. (2016). Perceptual Models of Human-Robot Proxemics. In: Hsieh, M., Khatib, O., Kumar, V. (eds) Experimental Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 109. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23778-7_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23778-7_18

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