A Concept for Three-Dimensional Proxemics in Human-Robot Collaboration

In the past decades, the number of robots has been drastically increased in logistics and production facilities. New concepts for robots working together with humans need to focus on social norms which are already in place in the interaction between humans. In this poster, we present a concept to visualize and manipulate an individual proxemic distance volume (PDV) with the help of augmented reality glasses. The idea is based on proxemic distances (Hall, 1990), which define four different distance zones for human-human interaction and have shown to be applicable for the interaction between humans and robots before. However, the different zones might vary depending on the individual abilities and properties of the human but also the robot (Kirks et al., 2020). Furthermore, due to the variability of robot devices, such as mobile robots, robot arms, or drones, the proxemic distance is not limited to two dimensions but needs to be addressed in 3D. As a result, our concept of a PDV is a 3-dimensional volume visualization, which can be manipulated in various ways, such as changing the overall scale but also the specific form or selected areas of the PDV, depending on the individual needs of a worker. Furthermore, the user can directly test the behavior of robots with his/her PDV with a first person or third person view. Our concept aims to increase the acceptance of proxemic-based robot control towards workers in logistics and production facilities.