Despite the rise of mobile robot deployments in home and work settings, perceived safety of users and bystanders is understudied in the human-robot interaction (HRI) literature. To address this, we present a study designed to identify elements of a human-robot encounter that correlate with observed stress response. Stress is a key component of perceived safety and is strongly associated with human physiological response. In this study a Boston Dynamics Spot and a Unitree Go1 navigate autonomously through a shared environment occupied by human participants wearing multimodal physiological sensors to track their electrocardiography (ECG) and electrodermal activity (EDA). The encounters are varied through several trials and participants self-rate their stress levels after each encounter. The study resulted in a multidimensional dataset archiving various objective and subjective aspects of a human-robot encounter, containing insights for understanding perceived safety in such encounters. To this end, acute stress responses were decoded from the human participants' ECG and EDA and compared across different human-robot encounter conditions. Statistical analysis of data indicate that on average (1) participants feel more stress during encounters compared to baselines, (2) participants feel more stress encountering multiple robots compared to a single robot and (3) participants stress increases during navigation behavior compared with search behavior.

翻译：尽管移动机器人在家庭和工作环境中的部署日益增多，但人机交互（HRI）文献中对用户及旁观者感知安全性的研究仍显不足。为解决此问题，我们提出了一项研究，旨在识别人类与机器人相遇过程中与观察到的应激反应相关的要素。应激是感知安全性的关键组成部分，且与人体生理反应密切相关。在本研究中，一台波士顿动力Spot机器人和一台宇树Go1机器人在共享环境中自主导航，该环境由佩戴多模态生理传感器的人类参与者占据，以追踪其心电图（ECG）和皮电活动（EDA）。通过多次试验改变相遇条件，参与者在每次相遇后自我评估其应激水平。该研究生成了一份多维数据集，记录了人机相遇的多种客观与主观方面，为理解此类相遇中的感知安全性提供了见解。为此，我们从人类参与者的心电图和皮电活动中解码出急性应激反应，并在不同人机相遇条件下进行比较。数据统计分析表明，平均而言：（1）参与者与机器人相遇时的应激水平高于基线状态；（2）参与者与多台机器人相遇时的应激水平高于与单台机器人相遇时；（3）参与者在导航行为期间的应激水平高于搜索行为期间。