Title
Enthusiastic Robots Make Better Contact
Author
Saad, E.
Broekens, D.J.
Neerincx, M.A.
Hindriks, K.V.
Publication year
2019
Abstract
This paper presents the design and evaluation of human-like welcoming behaviors for a humanoid robot to draw the attention of passersby by following a three-step model: (1) selecting a target (person) to engage, (2) executing behaviors to draw the target's attention, and (3) monitoring the attentive response. A computer vision algorithm was developed to select the person, start the behaviors and monitor the response automatically. To vary the robot's enthusiasm when engaging passersby, a waving gesture was designed as basic welcoming behavioral element, which could be successively combined with an utterance and an approach movement. This way, three levels of enthusiasm were implemented: Mild (waving), moderate (waving and utterance) and high (waving, utterance and approach movement). The three levels of welcoming behaviors were tested with a Pepper robot at the entrance of a university building. We recorded data and observation sheets from several hundreds of passersby (N = 364) and conducted post-interviews with randomly selected passersby (N = 28). The level selection was done at random for each participant. The passersby indicated that they appreciated the robot at the entrance and clearly recognized its role as a welcoming robot. In addition, the robot proved to draw more attention when showing high enthusiasm (i.e., more welcoming behaviors), particularly for female passersby.
Subject
Healthy for Life
Healthy Living
Human Robot Interaction
Robot Behaviors
Drawing Attention
Social robotics
Enthusiastic Robots
Greeting Model
Engagement
To reference this document use:
http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:177e1252-885e-4c50-96bc-867ce873e978
TNO identifier
873362
ISBN
9781728140049
Source
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Macau, China, Nov. 4-8, 2019
Document type
conference paper