Let Me Show You Your New Home: Studying the Effect of Proxemicawareness of Robots on Usersxe2x80x99 First Impressions First impressions play an important part in social interactions, establishing the foundation of a personxe2x80x99s opinion about their counterparts. Since interpersonal communication is essentially multimodal, people are judged during first encounters by both their verbal utterances and nonverbal behavior, such as how they utilize eye contact, body distance, and body orientation. In this paper, we argue that robots would provide better user experiences, including being perceived as more likable if they were able to make a good first impression when introduced to a new home. Moreover, we wanted to test if robots can improve their perceived impression by behaving in a proxemicaware manner; i.e., by following established social norms, which prescribe, for example how far people should position themselves around other objects to improve the facilitation of social interactions. In order to test this hypothesis, we conducted a user study with 16 participants in a virtual reality setting, comparing the impression of two agents being introduced to their new homes by users. We found that the proxemicaware agent was indeed perceived as significantly better considering multiple constructs, including perceived anthropomorphism and trustworthiness.

An Exploratory Study on Proxemics Preferences of Humans in Accordance with Attributes of Service Robots Service robots that possess social interactive capabilities are vital to cater to the demand in emerging domains of robotic applications. A service robot frequently needs to interact with users when performing service tasks. The comfortability of users depends on the humanrobot proxemics during these interactions. Hence, a service robot should be capable of maintaining proper proxemics that improves the comfort of users. The proxemics preferences of users might depend on diverse attributes of a robot, such as emotional state, noise level, and physical appearance. Therefore, it is vital to gain a better understanding of a robotxe2x80x99s attributes which influence humanrobot proxemics behavior. This paper contributes to an exploratory study to analyze the effects on humanrobot proxemics preferences due to a robotxe2x80x99s attributes; facial and vocal emotions, level of internal noises, and the physical appearance. Four substudies have been conducted to gather the required humanrobot proxemics data. The gathered data have been analyzed through statistical tests. The test statistics reveal that facial and vocal emotions, internal noise level, and the physical appearance of a robot have significant effects on proxemics preferences of humans. The outcomes of this exploratory study would be useful in designing and developing humanrobot proxemics strategies of a service robot that would enhance social interaction.