Exploring a Ground-Air Personal Space in Human-Drone Interactions

Drones are becoming more popular among emerging technologies and expected to be ubiquitous soon. Even though drones were used only in the military domain in earlier decades, with the recent advancements of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) technology, drones have started to appear in civil domain in a rapid manner. But until now, less work has been considered drone as a social entity.In order for drones to approach humans, the acceptance level of the drone as a social entity and the proxemics ranges for a comfortable interaction need to be better understood. So in this paper we are presenting an autonomous drone application which can effectively identify the efficient parameters of Human Drone Interactive space and continuously maintain those parameters as a companion was studied. Thereby trying to understand the convenient proxemics boundaries in Human Drone interactions. The results have shown that acceptance level of the drone as a companion is high among the participants and 1.75m-3.4m is the horizontal distance range and 1.9m-3m is the altitude range that the users preferred most to interact with a companion drone.