Human-Drone Interaction: Interacting with People Smoking in Prohibited Areas Yermakhan Kassym Saparkhan Kassymbekov yermakhan.kassym@nu.edu.kz saparkhan.kassymbekov@nu.edu.kz Department of Robotics and Mechatronics School of Engineering and Digital Sciences Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan Kamila Zhumakhanova Anara Sandygulova kamila.zhumakhanova@nu.edu.kz anara.sandygulova@nu.edu.kz Department of Robotics and Mechatronics School of Engineering and Digital Sciences Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan ABSTRACT Drones are continually entering our daily lives by being used in a number of diferent applications. This creates a natural demand for better interaction ways between humans and drones. One of the possible applications that would beneft from improved interaction is the inspection of smoking in prohibited areas. We propose our own gesture of drone fight that we believe would deliver the mes- sage łnot to smokež better than the ready-made built-in gesture. To this end, we conducted a within-subject experiment involving 19 participants, where we evaluated the gestures on a drone op- erated through the Wizard-of-Oz interaction design. The results demonstrate that the proposed gesture was better at conveying the message compared to the built-in gesture. CCS CONCEPTS · Human-centered computing → Interaction design;· Ap- plied computing;· Computer systems organization → Robot- ics; KEYWORDS drones, human-drone interaction ACM Reference Format: Yermakhan Kassym, Saparkhan Kassymbekov, Kamila Zhumakhanova, and Anara Sandygulova. 2023. Human-Drone Interaction: Interacting with People Smoking in Prohibited Areas. In Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE In- ternational Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’23 Companion), March 13–16, 2023, Stockholm, Sweden. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3568294.3580173 1 INTRODUCTION As drones are entering our daily lives ofering diverse areas of real- life applications, researching the interaction between drones and humans is gaining more ground in the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research community. Drones are now used in agriculture for Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. HRI ’23 Companion, March 13–16, 2023, Stockholm, Sweden © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9970-8/23/03. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3568294.3580173 crop inspection, construction sights, cartography, bridge inspec- tions, delivery services and many more [5]. Drones have several advantages over mobile and humanoid robots due to their areal capabilities. One such advantage is larger surveillance areas, as drones can monitor from the top, while robots on the land have a limited view of the area. Another advantage is that drones can react to events much faster, as they can reach the place of a cer- tain event much quicker by air compared to robots moving on the ground. That is why the number of drone applications is increasing each year. This leads to a growing demand for a more intuitive and efcient interaction between humans and drones. A number of studies point to the importance of the emotional connection and intuitive information exchange for better societal acceptance of drones [2]. This acceptance will lead to more produc- tive and efcient human-drone collaboration in doing a number of common tasks. One of the applications which we want to improve by researching the interaction is drone inspection of smoking in prohibited areas. In order to do this, we used DJI Ryze Tello drone and compared two gestures performed by it to deliver the infor- mation. One gesture is the commercially built-in fip gesture, and the second is the proposed custom-designed shaking gesture. To evaluate the proposed gesture, we conducted a within-subject exper- iment involving 19 students aged 18-24 years old, in which a drone performed the gestures in front of the participants. We observed the participants’ reactions and interviewed them by asking several questions about their perception of the drone. To this end, we uti- lized a Wizard-of-Oz interaction paradigm in order to simulate the drone’s autonomy. Figure 1: Illustration of shaking gesture 2 RELATED WORKS Recent survey papers [4, 5] have discussed research works on human-drone interaction to determine what characteristics and design choices for the drone should be considered when designing 682