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Robots asking for directions: the willingness of passers-by to support robots

Published: 02 March 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This paper reports about a human-robot interaction field trial conducted with the autonomous mobile robot ACE (Autonomous City Explorer) in a public place, where the ACE robot needs the support of human passers-by to find its way to a target location. Since the robot does not possess any prior map knowledge or GPS support, it has to acquire missing information through interaction with humans. The robot thus has to initiate communication by asking for the way, and retrieves information from passers-by showing the way by gestures (pointing) and marking goal positions on a still image on the touch screen of the robot. The aims of the field trial where threefold: (1) Investigating the aptitude of the navigation architecture, (2) Evaluating the intuitiveness of the interaction concept for the passers-by, (3) Assessing people's willingness to support the ACE robot in its task, i.e. assessing the social acceptability. The field trial demonstrates that the architecture enables successful autonomous path finding without any prior map knowledge just by route directions given by passers-by. An additional street survey and observational data moreover attests the intuitiveness of the interaction paradigm and the high acceptability of the ACE robot in the public place.

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  • (2014)May i talk about other shops here?Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction10.1145/2559636.2559669(487-494)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2014
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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '10: Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction
March 2010
400 pages
ISBN:9781424448937

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IEEE Press

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Published: 02 March 2010

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  1. autonomous mobile robot
  2. field trial
  3. human-robot interaction
  4. social acceptance

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HRI '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 124 submissions, 21%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

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  • (2016)Help Me PleaseProceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2858036.2858217(4945-4955)Online publication date: 7-May-2016
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  • (2014)May i talk about other shops here?Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction10.1145/2559636.2559669(487-494)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2014
  • (2013)Understanding suitable locations for waitingProceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction10.5555/2447556.2447566(57-64)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2013
  • (2011)Transferring human-human interaction studies to HRI scenarios in public spaceProceedings of the 13th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction - Volume Part II10.5555/2042118.2042141(230-247)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2011
  • (2011)Do elderly people prefer a conversational humanoid as a shopping assistant partner in supermarkets?Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction10.1145/1957656.1957816(449-456)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2011
  • (2011)A communication structure for human-robot itinerary requestsProceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction10.1145/1957656.1957733(205-206)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2011
  • (2011)Development of a context model based on video analysisProceedings of the 6th international conference on Human-robot interaction10.1145/1957656.1957689(117-118)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2011

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