Aerial Flight Paths for Communication: How Participants Perceive and Intend to Respond to Drone Movements

This work has developed an iteratively refined understanding of participants' natural perceptions and responses to unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flight paths, or gestures. This includes both what they believe the UAV is trying to communicate to them, in addition to how they expect to respond through physical action. Previous work in this area has focused on eliciting gestures from participants to communicate specific states, or leveraging gestures that are observed in the world rather than on understanding what the participants believe is being communicated and how they would respond. This work investigates previous gestures either created or categorized by participants to understand the perceived content of their communication or expected response, through categories created by participant free responses and confirmed through forced choice testing. The human-robot interaction community can leverage this work to better understand how people perceive UAV flight paths, inform future designs for non-anthropomorphic robot communications, and apply lessons learned to elicit informative labels from people who may or may not be operating the vehicle. We found that the Negative Attitudes towards Robots Scale (NARS) can be a good indicator of how we can expect a person to react to a robot. Recommendations are also provided to use motion approaching/retreating from a person to encourage following, perpendicular to their field of view for blocking, and to use either no motion or large altitude changes to encourage viewing.