Investigation of effect of preliminary announcement methods on reduction of psychological threat of a mobile robot moving toward human

Abstract

This paper describes preliminary announcement methods for a daily-life-support robot using a robot avatar and their evaluation. We proposed four methods using the robot avatar. The first method expresses the robot's stop by glancing the robot avatar down the floor. The second method is similar to the first method; the difference is that the robot avatar glances the point at which the robot stops. As for the third or the fourth methods, the robot avatar always look at the stopping point or human face. The robot approached to a male participant from 3m distance with 0.8m/s at maximum. Then we asked the participant to fill a questionnaire to evaluate the psychological threat of the robot when the preliminary announcement methods were used. As a result of the experiment for 9 participants, we could not observe a tendency that preliminary announcement methods. The reason might be that the human-robot distance was too far at the initial position and was too near when the robot stopped.