A Trial Attempt by a Museum Guide Robot to Engage and Disengage the Audience on Time

DOI

10.2991/wiet-13.2013.5How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Human-Robot Interaction; Museum guide robot; Engagement; Social cues; Social robots

Abstract

Social robots may perform a variety of services like conveying information, guiding an audience, providing assistance to troubled customers and so on. In these situations, there might be a number of people who might need such assistance at the same time. Therefore, it is important to engage the audience, convey the information, and disengage the audience in time to allow the next group of people to have an opportunity to ask for help. A typical example of such a situation is a guided tour by a robot in a museum. We conducted a field experiment where we tested whether a robot can engage and disengage the audience at predetermined points in time so as to complete the tour in a predictable amount of time. With the help of social scientists, we created some verbal and non-verbal behaviors for the robot that are usually employed by professional museum guides to manage an audience. We analyzed the audience’s disengagement behavior (i.e., point of disengagement) by analyzing the video data captured during the experiment. We also confirmed the audience’s engagement with the exhibits by analyzing the questionnaire data from the experiment. This was our pilot trial and we experienced a few challenges. In this paper, we describe our observations as well as the challenges. Our pilot trial indicates that a combination of the behaviors that we programmed into the robot guide can disengage the audience more efficiently than when those behaviors are used separately or not used at all.

Copyright

© 2013, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Madhumita Ghosh
AU  - Hideaki Kuzuoka
PY  - 2013/12
DA  - 2013/12
TI  - A Trial Attempt by a Museum Guide Robot to Engage and Disengage the Audience on Time
BT  - Proceedings of the AASRI Winter International Conference on Engineering and Technology (AASRI-WIET 2013)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 18
EP  - 22
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/wiet-13.2013.5
DO  - 10.2991/wiet-13.2013.5
ID  - Ghosh2013/12
ER  -