An affective guide robot in a shopping mall

ABSTRACT

To explore possible robot tasks in daily life, we developed a guide robot for a shopping mall and conducted a field trial with it. The robot was designed to interact naturally with customers and to affectively provide shopping information. It was also designed to repeatedly interact with people to build a rapport; since a shopping mall is a place people repeatedly visit, it provides the chance to explicitly design a robot for multiple interactions. For this capability, we used RFID tags for person identification. The robot was semi-autonomous, partially controlled by a human operator, to cope with the difficulty of speech recognition in a real environment and to handle unexpected situations.

A field trial was conducted at a shopping mall for 25 days to observe how the robot performed this task and how people interacted with it. The robot interacted with approximately 100 groups of customers each day. We invited customers to sign up for RFID tags and those who participated answered questionnaires. The results revealed that 63 out of 235 people in fact went shopping based on the information provided by the robot. The experimental results suggest promising potential for robots working in shopping malls.

References

1. Kidd, C. and Breazeal, C., Effect of a Robot on User Perceptions, IROS'04, pp. 3559--3564, 2004.
2. Powers, A. et al., Comparing a Computer Agent with a Humanoid Robot, HRI2007, pp.145--152, 2007.
3. Mutlu, B. et al., A Storytelling Robot: Modeling and Evaluation of Human-like Gaze Behavior, IEEE Int. Conf. on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids2006), pp. 518--523, 2006.
4. Kahn, P. H. Jr., et al., Design Patterns for Sociality in Human Robot Interaction, HRI2008, pp. 97--104, 2008.
5. Burgard, W. et al., The interactive museum tour-guide robot, Proc. of National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 11--18, 1998.
6. Siegwart, R. et al., Robox at Expo.02: A Large Scale Installation of Personal Robots, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 42(3), pp. 203--222, 2003.
7. Kanda, T. et al., Interactive Robots as Social Partners and Peer Tutors for Children: A Field Trial, Human Computer Interaction, 19(1-2), pp. 61--84, 2004.
8. Wada, K. et al., Effects of robot-assisted activity for elderly people and nurses at a day service center, Proceedings of the IEEE, 92(11), pp. 1780--1788, 2004.
9. Dautenhahn, K. et al., A quantitative technique for analysing robot-human interactions, IROS'02, pp.1132--1138, 2002.
10. Kozima, H., Nakagawa C., and Yasuda, Y., Interactive robots for communication-care: A case-study in autism therapy, RoMan 2005, pp. 341--346, 2005.
11. Tanaka, F. et al., Socialization between toddlers and robots at an early childhood education center, Proc. of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 104(46), pp. 17954--17958, 2007.
12. Dahlback, D. et al., Wizard of Oz studies - why and how, Knowledge based systems, 6(4), pp. 258--266, 1993.
13. Green A. et al. Applying the Wizard-of-Oz Framework to Cooperative Service Discovery and Configuration, RoMan 2004, 2004.
14. Glas, D. F. et al., Simultaneous Teleoperation of Multiple Social Robots, HRI2008, pp.311--318, 2008.
15. Dario, P., Guglielmelli, E., and Laschi, C., Humanoids and personal robots: Design and experiments, Journal of Robotic Systems, 18 (12), pp. 673--690, 2001.
16. Goetz, J., Kiesler, S., and Powers, A., Matching robot appearance and behaviors to tasks to improve human robot cooperation, RoMan 2003, pp. 55--60, 2003.
17. Robins, B., Ferrari, E., and Dautenhahn, K., Developing Scenarios for Robot Assisted Play, RoMan2008, pp. 180--186, 2008.
18. Research study for the scope of the strategy map of robotics technology, 2005. (Available at http://www.nedo.go.jp/ database/index.html, with index code 100007875) (in Japanese)
19. Picard, R. W., Affective Computing, 1997.
20. Kanda, T. et al., Who will be the customer?: A social robot that anticipates people's behavior from their trajectories, UbiComp2008, 2008.
21. Sanfeliu, A., Hagita, N., and Saffiotti, A., Special Issue: Network Robot Systems, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 2008.
22. Ishi, C. T. et al., Robust speech recognition system for communication robots in real environments, IEEE Int. Conf. on Humanoid Robots, pp. 340--345, 2006.
23. Shiomi, M. et al., A Semi-autonomous Communication Robot -A Field Trial at a Train Station -, HRI2008, pp.303--310, 2008.
24. Bickmore, T. W. and Picard, R. W., Establishing and maintaining long-term human-computer relationships, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 293--327,2005.
25. Sugiyama, O. et al., Humanlike conversation with gestures and verbal cues based on a three-layer attention-drawing model, Connection science, 18(4), pp. 379--402, 2006.
26. Gockley, R., Forlizzi, J., and Simmons, R., Interactions with a Moody Robot, HRI2006, pp. 186--193, 2006.
27. Murakita, T. et al., Human Tracking using Floor Sensors based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method, Proc. Int. Conf. Pattern Recognition (ICPR04), pp. 917--920, 2004.
28. Kanda, T. et al., A two-month Field Trial in an Elementary School for Long-term Human-robot Interaction, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 23(5), pp. 962--971, 2007.
29. Shiwa, T., Kanda, T., Imai, M., Ishiguro, H., and Hagita, N., How Quickly Should Communication Robots Respond? HRI2008, 2008.
30. Heerink, M., Kröse, B., Wielinga, B., and Evers, V., Enjoyment Intention to Use and Actual Use of a Conversational Robot by Elderly People, HRI2008, pp. 113--119, 2008.
31. Takayama, L., Ju, W., and Nass, C., Beyond Dirty, Dangerous and Dull: What Everyday People Think Robots Should Do, HRI 2008, pp. 25--32, 2008.
32. Toyoda, H., Structural Equation Modeling, Tokyo Tosho, 2007. (in Japanese)
33. Kaplan, D. W., Structural Equation Modeling: Foundations and Extensions, Sage Publications, 2000

Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)

    • Interaction paradigms

  • Interaction design

    • Interaction design process and methods

      • User centered design