Where Should I Sit? Exploring the Impact of Seating Arrangement in a Human-Robot Collaborative Task

Abstract

Robots are increasingly becoming present in workplaces and social scenarios, where people are interacting and completing tasks with them. In this paper, we explore the importance of the physical seating arrangement or placement of the robot in relation to the human. We designed a novel collaborative human-robot task for exploring how human-robot seating arrangement may influence interaction and the person’s perceptions of a robot, and present the results from a pilot and two formal experiments (total 72 participants). Drawing from proxemics literature, we compared a person sitting next to a robot to being across a table from it or beside it, with a corner between them. Our results highlight a range of impacts on participant attitudes toward the robot, as well as their behavior and interaction with it. In particular, seating arrangement impacted participant preferences for the robot, and their use of aggression or condescension during disagreements with it. Our results highlight the importance of seating arrangements for collaborative human-robot teams.

Citation

Geiskkovitch, DY, Rea, DJ, Seo, AY, Seo, SH, Postnikoff, B, Young, JE. 2020. Where should I sit? Exploring the Impact of Seating Arrangement in a Human-Robot Collaborative Task. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI’20).