Influence of the Height of a Robot on Comfortableness of Verbal Interaction

We investigated the effect of height of a robot on comfortableness of verbal interaction with the robot. We created a robot whose height could be changed continuously, and carried out dialog experiments with humans at varying robot heights. We employed 19 participants to evaluate “comfortableness of dialog”, and investigated the height at which the participants felt the dialog was most comfortable. Next, we investigated differences of dialog comfortableness when the height of the robot was changed. Finally, we changed the distance between the participant and the robot and observed whether the dialog comfortableness changed or not. The experimental results yielded the following three guidelines for designing the height of a communication robot. First, the optimum height of a communication robot is about 300mm lower than the eye height of the user. Second, the comfortableness of dialog with the robot degrades when the height of the robot is 200mm lower or 300mm higher than the optimum height. Third, the distance between the robot and the user does not affect the optimum height of the robot.