Abstract
We address the question of whether service robots that interact with humans in public spaces must express socially appropriate behaviour. To do so, we implemented a robot bartender which is able to take drink orders from humans and serve drinks to them. By using a high-level automated planner, we explore two different robot interaction styles: in the task only setting, the robot simply fulfils its goal of asking customers for drink orders and serving them drinks; in the socially intelligent setting, the robot additionally acts in a manner socially appropriate to the bartender scenario, based on the behaviour of humans observed in natural bar interactions. The results of a user study show that the interactions with the socially intelligent robot were somewhat more efficient, but the two implemented behaviour settings had only a small influence on the subjective ratings. However, there were objective factors that influenced participant ratings: the overall duration of the interaction had a positive influence on the ratings, while the number of system order requests had a negative influence. We also found a cultural difference: German participants gave the system higher pre-test ratings than participants who interacted in English, although the post-test scores were similar.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 15th ACM on International conference on multimodal interaction |
| Publisher | ACM |
| Pages | 263-270 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-1-4503-2129-7 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |