Too Close to You? A Study on Emotion-Adapted Proxemics Behaviours

The development of social robots with advanced conversational capabilities aiming to engage humans in natural interactions has recently surged. This paper investigates the dynamic aspect of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), focusing on the regulation of interpersonal distance based on human emotion. Through a user study with a humanoid robot, we explore how participants perceive and respond to rule-based versus randomly generated robot behaviours in adjusting inter-personal space during an unconstrained conversation. Results suggest that participants perceive the robot using rule-based behaviours as more socially competent and adaptable to human behaviour and emotions compared to the random ones. These findings highlight the importance of considering subtle non-verbal cues and adapting robot behaviour based on human emotions to improve the quality of HRI, and consequently facilitate the successful integration of human natural nuances in robots.