Olivia @ TechFest 09: receptionist robot impressed visitors with lively interactions

ABSTRACT

Olivia 2.0 is a Social Robot designed to interact and serve in office environment as a Robotic Receptionist. This is the forth model of Service Robot developed by A*STAR Robotics Team in Singapore.

For a start, the occupation & background story of Olivia as a receptionist has set a common ground between human and robot for interaction around topics fitting to the job. The use of vision technology enabled Olivia to detect the presence of a visitor standing in front of her so that she will initiate a dialogue. Through speech recognition technology and careful designed dialogue management system, visitors are able to converse with Olivia to know more about the amenities in Fusionopolis building as well as to engage in small talk.

Taking the persona of a 5 years old kid, with a cute face and child voice, coupled with nice decorations has set the stage for a fun interaction time, as Olivia proceeds to engage the visitor to play a simple game that showcased object recognition and tracking capability.

Olivia is built with advanced Mechatronics design with 13 degree of freedom for head, body and hands motions. The advance motion control algorithm and imitation learning software trained her well to display humanlike hand gestures and upper body movements. We noticed the lively gestures coupled with expressive robotic voice are very crucial to draw attention from human for the continuous engagement with Social Robot.

We knew that this would be a valuable field trial opportunity whereby many visitors were having first encountering with service robot. We took advantage to study social acceptance by taking video recording for every human-robot interactions, follow by inviting visitors to participate in on-site feedback gathering with questionnaires. Of more than 100 questionnaires completed, 62% gave an overall rating of good and above, several expressed that the response of the robot is slow and 75.5% found that the robot is able to recognize their speech without any difficulties. The top 3 robot features that people would like to have in the robot are: fast response; clear way of talking; delivering relevant information.

At the end of this technology exhibition over two days, more than 100 visitors interacted with Olivia for information enquiry and playing games. They were greatly impressed by her capabilities and above all they had a lot of fun interacting with her.

Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Embedded and cyber-physical systems

    • Robotics

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Control methods

      • Robotic planning

    • Planning and scheduling

      • Robotic planning

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

      • Graphical user interfaces