The influence of an interactive user training on perceived safety in HRI

As robots become more prevalent in personal use, human-robot interaction (HRI) must also take lay users into account. To ensure acceptance by new user groups, HRI must be perceived as safe. Since experience is a crucial factor in the perception of safety, we suggest an interactive user training to be a promising method to facilitate HRI for laypersons. In this paper, we analyze the level of perceived safety of 16 participants before and after a 30-minute user training compared to 14 participants of a control group without getting any robot-specific training. Further, the applicability of eye gaze parameters, i.e., fixation count and fixation duration, is evaluated as an objective metric to measure perceived safety. Whereas no significant effect of training can be found, habituation shows to have an impact on perceived safety in HRI. Even though the variables fixation count and fixation duration cannot be used to measure one’s perceived safety, the results lead to a better understanding of the shortcomings of using gaze parameters in the analysis of perceived safety.