A Common Social Distance Scale for Robots and Humans From keeping robots as inhome helpers to banning their presence or functions, a personxe2x80x99s willingness to engage in variably intimate interactions are signals of social distance: the degree of felt understanding of and intimacy with an individual or group that characterizes presocial and social connections. To date, social distance has been examined through surrogate metrics not actually representing the construct (e.g., selfdisclosure or physical proximity). To address this gap between operations and measurement, this project details a fourstage social distance scale development project, inclusive of systematic item poolgeneration, candidate item ratings for laypersons thinking about social distance, testing of candidate items via scalogram and initial validity analyses, and final testing for cumulative structure and predictive validity. The final metric yields a 15item (18, counting applications with a xe2x80x98nonexe2x80x99 option), threedimension scale for physical distance, relational distance, and conversational distance.

Factors Influencing The Human Preferred Interaction Distance Nonverbal interactions are a key component of human communication. Since robots have become significant by trying to get close to human beings, it is important that they follow social rules governing the use of space. Prior research has conceptualized personal space as physical zones which are based on static distances. This work examined how preferred interaction distance can change given different interaction scenarios. We conducted a user study using three different robot heights. We also examined the difference in preferred interaction distance when a robot approaches a human and, conversely, when a human approaches a robot. Factors included in quantitative analysis are the participantsxe2x80x99 gender, robotxe2x80x99s height, and method of approach. Subjective measures included human comfort and perceived safety. The results obtained through this study shows that robot height, participant gender and method of approach were significant factors influencing measured proxemic zones and accordingly participant comfort. Subjective data showed that experiment respondents regarded robots in a more favorable light following their participation in this study. Furthermore, the NAO was perceived most positively by respondents according to various metrics and the PR2 Tall, most negatively.