As social robots are being increasingly employed in service encounters, effective interactive design should be considered. This paper focused on heartwarming interaction for hospitality, and explored an impact of a kind of robot's behavior, perceived cuteness of a robot, and users' personality on the interactions. The experimental results identified key factors which affects impression of heartwarming interaction.
Social robots are expected to be a human labor support technology, and one application of them is an advertising medium in public spaces. When social robots provide information, such as recommended shops, adaptive communication according to the user's state is desired. User engagement, which is also defined as the level of interest in the robot, is likely to play an important role in adaptive communication. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new framework to estimate user engagement. The proposed method focuses on four unsolved open problems: multi-party interactions, process of state change in engagement, difficulty in annotating engagement, and interaction dataset in the real world. The accuracy of the proposed method for estimating engagement was evaluated using interaction duration. The results show that the interaction duration can be accurately estimated by considering the influence of the behaviors of other people; this also implies that the proposed model accurately estimates the level of engagement during interaction with the robot.
Social robots have been used to provide services in many public spaces. However, many of them are autonomous robots that have poor natural language conversation skills. It is considered a difficult task for an autonomous robot to be a salesperson. In this paper, we propose the use of a teleoperated robot with a human operator for sales purposes. We conducted an exploratory field experiment in which we built a sales booth in a shopping mall and used our teleoperated robot as the salesperson to promote the sales of toothbrushes. We found that our robot has the ability to attract people's attention and influence their shopping behavior. Furthermore, we discuss the research challenges in designing and applying teleoperated robots to real sales situations.
In this study, we explore the effective form of social presence for a tele-operated robot to provide customer service. Particularly, we address the question on if and how a tele-operated robot displays the presence of an operator, and what effects it would have on people's perception and behavior toward it. We launched a tele-operated robot in a supermarket and had it deliver recipe flyers. We adjusted the robot's social presence by showing or not showing the photo of an operator's face (F) and using or not using voice conversion (V), leading to three forms of presence: Wizard of Oz (F: no, V: yes), costume (F: yes, V: yes), and telepresence (F: yes, V: no), which indicated the operator's presence from a low to a high level. We determined that the customers behaved significantly different when they faced the tele-operated robot in different forms. Our robot that exhibited a moderate presence of the operator (costume form) achieved the overall best performance. Based on these findings, we discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of the three forms of presence for a tele-operated robot and recommend the appropriate form for various applications.
Customer service with teleoperated robots is suscep-tible to the same problems related to stress as is emotional labor in general, such as for in-person customer service representatives. In this study, we aimed to reduce that stress by constructing a buddy-like rapport between the robot, which is the target of teleoperation, and its operator. For this purpose, we designed an empathetic interaction between the robot and the operator and conducted a customer service experiment to verify its effectiveness. Our results demonstrate that the proposed interaction can build rapport between the robot and the operator and the operator can feel more reassured. Although the effect on stress could not be isolated directly from the data, detailed analyses of the response to the questionnaires indicated that the proposed interaction may be useful to relieve stress.
Social robots are used in daily life. One of the applications of social robots is as recommendation systems. Previous research has mainly investigated how persuasive recommendations can be improved by focusing on the non-verbal/verbal behavior of robots. However, to use robots as recommendation systems every day, it is extremely important to examine the persistence of repeated persuasion over a long term, rather than the effect of one-time persuasion. Therefore, the objective of this study was to investigate the persistence of repeated persuasive of robots. For this purpose, robots with three types of behavior (Expert Behavior, Local Behavior, and Growth Behavior) recommended nutrition bars in a situation of daily consumption behavior for two weeks. We could confirm significant differences in the persistent persuasiveness in each behavior. The results suggested that the combination of value co-creation using local information and meta-trust expression had a significant impact on the persistence of the repeated persuasiveness of the robots in the longitudinal period. However, the acceptance of the recommendation robot system decreased due to the increase in the amount of information during recommendation; therefore, a new recommend system to solve this problem is desired.
Research currently being conducted on the use of robots as human labor support technology. In particular, the service industry needs to allocate more manpower, and it will be important for robots to support people. This study focuses on using a humanoid robot as a social service robot to convey information in a shopping mall, and the robot's behavioral concepts were analyzed. In order to convey the information, two processes must occur. Pedestrians must stop in front of the robot, and the robot must continue the engagement with them. For the purpose of this study, three types of autonomous behavioral concepts of the robot for the general use were analyzed and compared in these processes in the experiment: active, passive-negative, and passive-positive concepts. After interactions were attempted with 65,000+ pedestrians, this study revealed that the passive-negative concept can make pedestrians stop more and stay longer. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the robot in a real environment, the comparative results between three behaviors and human advertisers revealed that (1) the results of the active and passive-positive concepts of the robot are comparable to those of the humans, and (2) the performance of the passive-negative concept is higher than that of all participants. These findings demonstrate that the performance of robots is comparable to that of humans in providing information tasks in a limited environment; therefore, it is expected that service robots as a labor support technology will be able to perform well in the real world.
