Social signals are commonly used to facilitate the usability of humanoid robots. While providing the robot with an extended expressibility, these signals are often applied only in structured interactions where parts of the familiarization or farewell processes are disregarded in the evaluation. In order to establish the consideration of a more comprehensive view, this article presents a holistic model of human encounters with a social robot. We propose and discuss particular robot signals, which aim to express the robot’s social awareness, for each of the model’s phases. We present an interaction study with humans that are inexperienced in interacting with robots to investigate the effects of these signals. Results verify that the implementation of proposed signals is beneficial for the participants’ user experience. The study further reveals a strong interdependency of a robot’s social signals and the importance of addressing entire encounters in human–robot interaction studies.

社交信号通常用于促进类人机器人的可用性。在为机器人提供扩展的表达能力的同时，这些信号通常仅应用于结构化交互中，在评估中忽略了部分熟悉或告别过程。为了建立对更全面视图的考虑，本文提供了与社交机器人的人类相遇的整体模型。我们提出并讨论了特定的机器人信号，旨在表达模型每个阶段的机器人社会意识。我们提出了与人类互动研究，这些人类在与机器人互动方面缺乏经验，无法研究这些信号的影响。结果验证了建议信号的实施对参与者的用户体验是有益的。