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场所的部署日益增多，但人机交互（HRI）文献中对用户和旁观者感知安全性的研究仍显不足。为此，我们设计了一项研究，旨在识别与观察到的应激反应相关的人机交互要素。应激是感知安全性的关键组成部分，并与人类生理反应密切相关。在本研究中，Boston Dynamics Spot 和 Unitree Go1 机器人在共享环境中自主导航，该环境中的人类参与者佩戴多模态生理传感器以追踪其心电图（ECG）和皮肤电活动（EDA）。通过多次试验改变交互条件，参与者在每次交互后自评其应激水平。本研究构建了一个多维数据集，归档了人机交互中各种客观与主观层面的信息，为理解此类交互中的感知安全性提供了见解。基于此，我们从参与者的 ECG 和 EDA 数据中解码出急性应激反应，并比较了不同人机交互条件下的差异。统计分析表明，平均而言：（1）相较于基线，参与者在交互过程中感受到更高应激水平；（2）与单个机器人交互相比，参与者面对多个机器人时产生更强应激反应；（3）机器人的导航行为比搜索行为更易引发参与者应激水平上升。