Behavioral Assessment of a Humanoid Robot When Attracting Pedestrians in a Mall

Research is currently being conducted on the use of robots as human labor support technology. In particular, the service industry needs to allocate more manpower, and it will be important for robots to support people. This study focuses on using a humanoid robot as a social service robot to convey information in a shopping mall, and the types of robot behaviors were analyzed. In order to convey the information, two processes must occur. Pedestrians must stop in front of the robot, and the robot must continue the engagement with them. For the purpose of this study, three types of autonomous robot behaviors were analyzed and compared in these processes in the experiment: greeting, in-trouble, dancing behaviors. After interactions were attempted with 5,000+ pedestrians, this study revealed that the in-trouble behavior can make pedestrians stop more and stay longer. In addition, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the robot in a real environment, the comparative results between three robot behaviors and human advertisers revealed that (1) the results of the greeting and dancing behavior are comparable to those of the humans, and (2) the performance of the in-trouble behavior in providing information tasks is higher than that of all human advertisers. These findings demonstrate that the performance of robots is comparable to that of humans in providing information tasks in a limited environment; therefore, it is expected that service robots as a labor support technology will be able to perform well in the real world.