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My Telepresence, My Culture?: An Intercultural Investigation of Telepresence Robot Operators' Interpersonal Distance Behaviors

Published: 19 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Interpersonal distance behaviors can vary significantly across countries and impact human social interaction. Do these cross-cultural differences play out when one of the interaction partners participates through a teleoperated robot? Emerging research shows that when being approached by a robot, people tend to hold similar cultural preferences as they would for an approaching human. However, no work yet has investigated this question from a robot teleoperator's perspective. Toward answering this, we conducted an online study (N = 774) using a novel simulation paradigm across two countries (U.S. and India). Results show that in the role of a telepresence robot operator, participants exhibited cross-cultural differences in interpersonal distance behavior in line with human-human proxemic research, indicating that culture-specific distance behavior can manifest in the way a robot operator controls a robot. We discuss implications for designers who seek to automate path planning and navigation for teleoperated robots.

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  • (2024)TableBot: Getting a Handle on Hybrid Collaboration by Negotiating Control of a Tabletop Telepresence RobotProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685350(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2018
      8489 pages
      ISBN:9781450356206
      DOI:10.1145/3173574
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      Published: 19 April 2018

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      Author Tags

      1. cross-cultural
      2. human-robot interaction
      3. interpersonal distance
      4. proxemics
      5. robot-mediated communication
      6. robotic telepresence systems
      7. telepresence robots

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      • (2024)TableBot: Getting a Handle on Hybrid Collaboration by Negotiating Control of a Tabletop Telepresence RobotProceedings of the 13th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3679318.3685350(1-15)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
      • (2024)I feel being there, they feel being together: Exploring How Telepresence Robots Facilitate Long-Distance Family CommunicationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642305(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
      • (2022)Adapting approaching proxemics of a service robot based on physical user behavior and user feedbackUser Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction10.1007/s11257-022-09329-833:2(195-220)Online publication date: 30-May-2022
      • (2021)Multimodal Features as a Novel Method for Cross-Cultural StudiesCross-Cultural Design. Experience and Product Design Across Cultures10.1007/978-3-030-77074-7_40(527-546)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2021
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