Wingman-Leader Recommendation: An Empirical Study on Product Recommendation Strategy Using Two Robots

In recent years, the potential applications of social robots in retail environments have been explored. Previous studies have mainly focused on the performance of a single robot and have rarely considered the use of multiple robots to recommend products. Although a previous study did investigate the effectiveness of using two robots to recommend products, it remains unclear whether their results can be attributed a cooperative strategy or simply to the number of robots used. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of a combination strategy called wingman-leader recommendation (WLR), in which a wingman robot outside an establishment promotes a leader robot positioned inside to improve the lead robot's sales performance. Our findings suggest that the wingman robot attracted customers' attention to the leader robot and encouraged them to initiate interactions with it inside the store. We found that using two robots with the WLR strategy achieved better overall performance in terms of sales compared to using two robots without this strategy.