Human-Robot Interfaces for Interactive Receptionist Systems and Wayfinding Applications

Abstract

Service robots are playing an increasingly relevant role in society. Humanoid robots, especially those equipped with social skills, could be used to address a number of people’s daily needs. Knowing how these robots are perceived and potentially accepted by ordinary users when used in common tasks and what the benefits brought are in terms, e.g., of tasks’ effectiveness, is becoming of primary importance. This paper specifically focuses on receptionist scenarios, which can be regarded as a good benchmark for social robotics applications given their implications on human-robot interaction. Precisely, the goal of this paper is to investigate how robots used as direction-giving systems can be perceived by human users and can impact on their wayfinding performance. A comparative analysis is performed, considering both solutions from the literature and new implementations which use different types of interfaces to ask for and give directions (voice, in-the-air arm pointing gestures, route tracing) and various embodiments (physical robot, virtual agent, interactive audio-map). Experimental results showed a marked preference for a physical robot-based system showing directions on a map over solutions using gestures, as well as a positive effect of embodiment and social behaviors. Moreover, in the comparison, physical robots were generally preferred to virtual agents.

A Systematic Review of Attitudes, Anxiety, Acceptance, and Trust Towards Social Robots

“…This suggests that interacting with a robot face-to-face elicits more positive feelings toward said robot (or robots in general) than does some form of indirect contact such as watching a video of the robot. These findings may be an important consideration when measuring attitudes in HRI contexts where the affective evaluation of a robotic platform during indirect contact may not accurately represent people's feelings toward that robot, or social robots in general [72,80].…”

Service robots in the hospitality industry: The case of Henn-na hotel, Japan

“…Three decades ago, Engelhardt [4] argued that service robots encompassed a wide spectrum of technological fields and held the potential for combining or even for surpassing industrial use. Those were perhaps very optimistic words for the time, but in fact, over time, we have witnessed the inclusion of service robots in several daily activities [5] such as healthcare [6][7][8], education [9] or mobility [10]. Moreover, consumer acceptance has made service robots' technologies one of the most recent entries in the field of hospitality [11].…”

Service Robots in the Hospitality Industry: An Exploratory Literature Review

“…The selected article allowed us to study the service robots in the hospitality industry through the lens of the main dimensions of frontline service delivery by robots, which brought stimulating results. Similar research in the literature focused on scenarios and comparative analysis, notably examples are provided by Bazzano and Lamberti [2], who considered solutions and new implementations that use interfaces to request and give directions (e.g., voice) and/or various embodiments (e.g., physical robot, virtual agents). Our research is different in that it analyses a real-life scenario of a hotel that used service robots in its service systems without any human intervention.…”

“…The emerging domain of service robots encompasses a broad spectrum of advanced technologies and holds the potential to outperform industrial robots in both scope and diversification [1]. Service robots are becoming more common in various activities of daily life [2], such as healthcare [3], mobility [4], and so on. Hospitality services are no exception, as several researchers have been investigating the effects of robotic services on hotel brand experiences [5,6].…”