Designing social greetings in human robot interaction

We designed and operationalized a greetings model for human robot interaction as a state machine, derived from a subset of social behaviors as detailed by Kendon's observations of greetings and augmented by Hall's proxemics theory. Our premise is that designing robot greetings on the social science of human greetings will make the robot's greeting actions socially understandable. Specifically, we track the location and orientation of a Nao humanoid robot relative to a person, and programmed the robot via state transitions to engage in a distance salutation, approach, close salutation and transition as described by theory. Overall, our design appears effective in simulating social intelligence during greetings.