Interact With Me: An Exploratory Study on Interaction Factors for Active Physical Human-Robot Interaction

In future robotic applications in environments such as nursing houses, construction sites, private homes, etc, robots might need to take unpredicted physical actions according to the state of the users to overcome possible human errors. Referring to these actions as active physical human-robot interactions (active pHRI), in this letter, the goal is to verify the possibility of identifying measurable interaction factors that could be used in future active pHRI controllers, by exploring and analyzing the state of the users during active pHRI. We hypothesize that active physical robot actions can cause measurable alterations in the physical and physiological data of the users, and that these measurements could be interpreted with users' personality and perceptions. We design an experiment where the participant uses the robot to play a visual puzzle game, during which, the robot takes unanticipated physical actions. We collect physiological and physical data, as well as outcomes of two state-of-the-art questionnaires on the perceptions of robots, CH-33 and Godspeed Series Questionnaires (GSQ), and a pre-experiment personality questionnaire, to relate the collected data with the users' perceptions and personality. The experiment outcomes show that we can extract a few factors related to personality, perception, physiological, and physical measurements. Even though we could not draw very clear correlations, these outcomes give fundamental insights for the design of novel pHRI experiments.