Using proxemics to evaluate human-robot interaction

Recent feasibility studies involving children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) interacting with socially assistive robots have shown that children can have both positive and negative reactions to robots. These reactions can be readily identified by a human observer watching videos from an overhead camera. Our goal is to automate the process of such behavior analysis. This paper shows how a heuristic classifier can be used to discriminate between children that are attempting to interact socially with a robot and children that are not.