Comfortable approach distance with small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Abstract-This paper presents the first known humansubject study of comfortable approach distance and height for human interaction with a small unmanned aerial vehicle (sUAV), finding no conclusive difference in comfort with a sUAV approaching a human at above head height or below head height. Understanding the amount, if any, of discomfort introduced by a sUAV flying in close proximity to a human is critical for law enforcement, crowd control, entertainment, or flying personal assistants. Previous work has focused on how humans interact with each other or with unmanned ground vehicles, and the experimental methods typically rely on the human participant to consciously express distress. The approach taken was to duplicate the experimental set up in human proxemics studies, while adding psychophysiological sensing, under the hypothesis that human-robot interaction will mirror human-human interaction. The 16 participant, within-subjects experiment did not confirm this hypothesis. Instead a sUAV above height of a "tall" person in human experiments (2.13 m) did not produce statistically different heart rate variability nor cause the participant to stop the robot further away than for a sUAV at a "short" height (1.52 m). The lack of effect may be due to two possible confounds: i) duplicating prior human proxemics experiments did not capture how a sUAV would likely move or interact and ii) telling the participants that the robot could not hurt them. Despite possible confounding, the results raise the question of whether humanhuman psychological and physical distancing behavior transfers to human-aerial robot interactions.

Effects of Human Connection through Social Drones and Perceived Safety

“…[16] examined the maneuver position of a drone that minimizes danger or stress when a drone interacts with people in public places. It was found that drones that interact with people are considered social robots (beings) and, hence, are required to remain at an appropriate distance or position, similar to humans interacting with humans in daily life.…”

Investigating Human-Robot Trust in Emergency Scenarios: Methodological Lessons Learned

“…Bethel and Murphy defined several zones for robot interaction: the intimate zone (0-0.46 m), the personal zone (0.46-1.22 m, maximum distance for communication), the social zone (1.22-3.66 m) and the public zone (further than 3.66 m) (Bethel and Murphy 2008;Murphy 2004). More recent work has extended this to UAVs (Duncan and Murphy 2013).…”

Communicating Directionality in Flying Robots

“…Recent research has begun to examine perceptions of aerial robot morphology [2] and proxemics [8]. Additionally, research has explored the implicit expression of flight intent [34] and affect [33] by manipulating aerial trajectories, velocities, and accelerations across three spatial dimensions.…”