Social Robots in human environments need to be able to reason about their physical surroundings while interacting with people. Furthermore, human proxemics behaviours around robots can indicate how people perceive the robots and can inform robot personality and interaction design. Here, we introduce Charlie, a situated robot receptionist that can interact with people using verbal and non-verbal communication in a dynamic environment, where users might enter or leave the scene at any time. The robot receptionist is stationary and cannot navigate. Therefore, people have full control over their personal space as they are the ones approaching the robot. We investigated the influence of different apparent robot personalities on the proxemics behaviours of the humans. The results indicate that different types of robot personalities, specifically introversion and extroversion, can influence human proxemics behaviours. Participants maintained shorter distances with the introvert robot receptionist, compared to the extrovert robot. Interestingly, we observed that human-robot proxemics were not the same as typical human-human interpersonal distances, as defined in the literature. We therefore propose new proxemics zones for human-robot interaction.

翻译：社交机器人需要在人类环境中与人互动时，能够推理其物理环境。此外，人类在机器人周围的近身行为可以反映人们对机器人的感知，并为机器人个性及交互设计提供参考。本文介绍了Charlie，一个可定位于动态环境中的机器人接待员，它能通过语言和非语言沟通与人交互，用户可能随时进入或离开场景。该机器人接待员是固定不动的，无法移动，因此人们完全掌控自己的个人空间，因为他们需要主动接近机器人。我们研究了不同外显机器人个性对人类近身行为的影响。结果表明，不同类型的机器人个性，特别是内向与外向，会影响人类的近身行为。与外向型机器人接待员相比，参与者与内向型机器人接待员保持更短的距离。有趣的是，我们观察到人-机器人近身行为与文献中定义的传统人际距离并不相同。因此，我们提出了人机交互中新的近身区域划分。