  With increased applications of collaborative robots (cobots) in industrial
workplaces, behavioural effects of human-cobot interactions need to be further
investigated. This is of particular importance as nonverbal behaviours of
collaboration partners in human-robot teams significantly influence the
experience of the human interaction partners and the success of the
collaborative task. During the Ars Electronica 2020 Festival for Art,
Technology and Society (Linz, Austria), we invited visitors to exploratively
interact with an industrial robot, exhibiting restricted interaction
capabilities: extending and retracting its arm, depending on the movements of
the volunteer. The movements of the arm were pre-programmed and telecontrolled
for safety reasons (which was not obvious to the participants). We recorded
video data of these interactions and investigated general nonverbal behaviours
of the humans interacting with the robot, as well as nonverbal behaviours of
people in the audience. Our results showed that people were more interested in
exploring the robot's action and perception capabilities than just reproducing
the interaction game as introduced by the instructors. We also found that the
majority of participants interacting with the robot approached it up to a
distance which would be perceived as threatening or intimidating, if it were a
human interaction partner. Regarding bystanders, we found examples where people
made movements as if trying out variants of the current participant's
behaviour.
