Would you like to sample? Robot engagement in a shopping centre

Tonkin, Meg; Vitale, Jonathan; Ojha, Suman; Williams, Mary-Anne; Fuller, Paul; Judge, William Q.; Wang, Xun

doi:10.1109/roman.2017.8172278

Cited by 20 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 31 publications

(50 reference statements)

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“…For example, customers gave the following reasons for accessing the QR code: “The robot was cute and stopped me in my tracks,” and “Sota recommended it to me.” They also gave answers for not accessing the code such as, “The robot suddenly started doing business.” This result suggests that the customers’ attention was focused on the robot and not on the content that the robot introduced. Similar results were confirmed in the studies of Song et al (2021) and Tonkin et al (2017) , and this experiment also reaffirmed the major challenges of proactive service delivery by robots.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…Still, the offsetting will not make a huge difference in performance. The results of the study by Tonkin et al, 2017 also showed that the maximum performance in both robot and staff conditions was the same. At least for the task of outbound customer service, as in this experiment and Tonkin’s study, we could not find any significant difference in performance between working remotely with a robot and working locally, and H1 was not denied.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

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Local vs. Avatar Robot: Performance and Perceived Workload of Service Encounters in Public Space

et al. 2021

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In recent years, the demand for remote services has increased with concerns regarding the spread of infectious diseases and employees’ quality of life. Many attempts have been made to enable store staff to provide various services remotely via avatars displayed to on-site customers. However, the workload required on the part of service staff by the emerging new work style of operating avatar robots remains a concern. No study has compared the performance and perceived workload of the same staff working locally versus remotely via an avatar. In this study, we conducted an experiment to identify differences between the performance of in-person services and remote work through an avatar robot in an actual public space. The results showed that there were significant differences in the partial performance between working via an avatar and working locally, and we could not find significant difference in the overall performance. On the other hand, the perceived workload was significantly lower when the avatar robot was used. We also found that customers reacted differently to the robots and to the in-person participants. In addition, the workload perceived by operators in the robotic task was correlated with their personality and experience. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first investigation of both performance and workload in remote customer service through robotic avatars, and it has important implications for the implementation of avatar robots in service settings.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Local vs. Avatar Robot: Performance and Perceived Workload of Service Encounters in Public Space

et al. 2021

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“…Sample tasting has been shown to be effective in promoting sales [ 24 ], where the psychological effect called the norm of reciprocity affects the customer, who feels that something must be returned after receiving something from another person. In addition, a study has been conducted in which tasting was performed using a robot in a field experiment [ 25 ]. In the study, the authors compared the abilities of a robot and humans to successfully advertise sample tastings to customers in large shopping centers, and demonstrated that the robot was more effective than humans.…”

Section: Modeling Of the State-transition In A Customer–robot Intementioning

confidence: 99%

State-Transition Modeling of Human–Robot Interaction for Easy Crowdsourced Robot Control

Iwasaki

Ikeda

Kawamura³

et al. 2020

Sensors

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Robotic salespeople are often ignored by people due to their weak social presence, and thus have difficulty facilitating sales autonomously. However, for robots that are remotely controlled by humans, there is a need for experienced and trained operators. In this paper, we suggest crowdsourcing to allow general users on the internet to operate a robot remotely and facilitate customers’ purchasing activities while flexibly responding to various situations through a user interface. To implement this system, we examined how our developed remote interface can improve a robot’s social presence while being controlled by a human operator, including first-time users. Therefore, we investigated the typical flow of a customer–robot interaction that was effective for sales promotion, and modeled it as a state transition with automatic functions by accessing the robot’s sensor information. Furthermore, we created a user interface based on the model and examined whether it was effective in a real environment. Finally, we conducted experiments to examine whether the user interface could be operated by an amateur user and enhance the robot’s social presence. The results revealed that our model was able to improve the robot’s social presence and facilitate customers’ purchasing activity even when the operator was a first-time user.

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“…Bennewitz et al [4] present a robotic system, called Alpha, that makes use of visual perception, sound source localisation, and speech recognition, to detect, track and interact with potential users. Tonkin et al [27] conduct experiments to validate a robot system in a shopping centre. In their work, they compare the performance of a robot and a human in promoting food samples and analyse the effects of the type of engagement used to achieve this goal.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Short-Term Human–Robot Interaction Adaptability in Real-World Environments

Andriella

Torras

Alenyà

2019

Int J of Soc Robotics

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In recent years there has been an increasing interest in deploying robotic systems in public environments able to effectively interact with people. To properly work in the wild, such systems should be robust and be able to deal with complex and unpredictable events that seldom happen in controlled laboratory conditions. Moreover, having to deal with untrained users adds further complexity to the problem and makes the task of defining effective interactions especially difficult.In this work, a Cognitive System that relies on planning is extended with adaptive capabilities and embedded in a Tiago robot. The result is a system able to help a person to complete a predefined game by offering various degrees of assistance. The robot may decide to change the level of assistance depending on factors such as the state of the game or the user performance at a given time. We conducted two days of experiments during a public fair. We selected random users to interact with the robot and only for one time. We show that, despite the short-term nature of human-robot interactions, the robot can effectively adapt its way of providing help, leading to better user performances as compared to a robot not providing this degree of flexibility.

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Would you like to sample? Robot engagement in a shopping centre

Cited by 20 publications

References 31 publications

Local vs. Avatar Robot: Performance and Perceived Workload of Service Encounters in Public Space

Local vs. Avatar Robot: Performance and Perceived Workload of Service Encounters in Public Space

State-Transition Modeling of Human–Robot Interaction for Easy Crowdsourced Robot Control

Short-Term Human–Robot Interaction Adaptability in Real-World Environments

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