Enabling Symbiotic Autonomy in Short-Term Interactions: A User Study

The presence of robots in everyday environments is increasing day by day, and their deployment spans over various applications: industrial and working scenarios, health care assistance in public areas or at home. However, robots are not yet comparable to humans in terms of capabilities; hence, in the so-called Symbiotic Autonomy, robots and humans help each other to complete tasks. Therefore, it is interesting to identify the factors that allow to maximize human-robot collaboration, which is a new point of view with respect to the HRI literature and very much leaning toward a social behavior. In this work, we analyze a subset of such variables as possible influencing factors of humans’ Collaboration Attitude in a Symbiotic Autonomy framework, namely: Proxemics setting, Activity Context, and Gender and Height as valuable features of the users. We performed a user study that takes place in everyday environments expressed as activity contexts, such as relaxing and working ones. A statistical analysis of the collected results shows a high dependence of the Collaboration Attitude in different Proxemics settings and Gender.