Abstract
Social robots are gradually being introduced in public places to perform various service tasks in which the robots interact with users in the service front line. The presence of social robots in stores and shopping malls is one noticeable aspect of this phenomenon. Customers tend to feel positive about such robots, but the long-term benefits and impact of social service robots are hard to estimate, especially from the business perspective. The MuMMER project has involved mall customers, store managers, and mall managers to study their expectations and concerns about a shopping mall robot. Pepper of SoftBank Robotics was used as the robot platform. All stakeholders showed mainly positive attitudes. Facilitating factors in the adoption of social robots in malls seem to be the capability of the robot to be both entertaining and useful; in particular, the robot requires advanced dialog capability in order to be able to serve customers and collaborate with personnel. Moreover, there needs to be a perceived potential of the robot to lead to increased sales or decreased costs in the mall. As part of the adoption of social robots in shopping malls, the mall and store staff should be involved in co-designing the robots’ tasks, and roles, as their work will be influenced by the robots in many ways.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
The original Finnish word luonteva can be translated to “natural” in this sense: “marked by easy simplicity and freedom from artificiality, affectation, or constraint” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/natural, def. 13b, accessed November 1, 2018). To emphasize this, we use the translation Natural/Easy.
References
Aaltonen, I., Arvola, A., Heikkilä, P., & Lammi, H. (2017). Hello pepper, may I tickle you? Children’s and adults’ responses to an entertainment robot at a shopping mall. In Proceedings of the Companion of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’17) (pp. 53–54).
Ager, D. (1997). Language, community and the state. Exeter, England: Intellect.
Brscic, D., Ikeda, T., & Kanda, T. (2017). Do you need help? A robot providing information to people who behave atypically. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 33(2), 500–506. https://doi.org/10.1109/TRO.2016.2645206.
Chen, Y., Wu, F., Shuai, W., Wang, N., Chen, R., & Chen, X. (2015). KeJia robot? An attractive shopping mall guider. In A. Tapus et al. (Ed.), ICSR2015, LNAI 9388 (pp. 145–154). Cham: Springer. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_15.
De Gauquier, L., Cao, H.-L., Gomez Esteban, P., De Beir, A., van de Sanden, S., Willems, K. … Vanderborght, B. (2018). Humanoid robot pepper at a Belgian chocolate shop. In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction—HRI’18 (p. 373). New York, NY, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/3173386.3177535.
Doering, N., Poeschl, S., Gross, H.-M., Bley, A., Martin, C., & Boehme, H.-J. (2015). User-centered design and evaluation of a mobile shopping robot. International Journal of Social Robotics, 7(2), 203–225. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-014-0257-8.
Fong, T., Nourbakhsh, I., & Dautenhahn, K. (2003). A survey of socially interactive robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 42(3–4), 143–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0921-8890(02)00372-X.
Foster, M. E., Alami, R., Gestranius, O., Lemon, O., Niemelä, M., Odobez, J.-M., & Pandey, A. K. (2016). The MuMMER project: engaging human-robot interaction in real-world public spaces. In A. Agah, J. Cabibihan, A. Howard, M. Salichs, & H. He (Eds.), Social robotics. ICSR 2016. Lecture notes in computer science (Vol. 9979 LNAI, pp. 753–763). Cham: Springer. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_74.
Glas, D. F., Wada, K., Shiomi, M., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., & Hagita, N. (2017). Personal greetings: Personalizing robot utterances based on novelty of observed behavior. International Journal of Social Robotics, 9(2), 181–198. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0385-4.
Gross, H. M., Boehme, H., Schroeter, C., Mueller, S., Koenig, A., Einhorn, E. … Bley, A. (2009). TOOMAS: Interactive shopping guide robots in everyday use—Final implementation and experiences from long-term field trials. In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2009 (pp. 2005–2012).
Heikkilä, P., Lammi, H., & Belhassein, K. (2018). Where can I find a pharmacy? Human-driven design of a service robot’s guidance behavior. In 4th Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction (PubRob 2018), International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2018), Barcelona, Spain.
Huang, C.-M., Iio, T., Satake, S., & Kanda, T. (2014). Modeling and controlling friendliness for an interactive museum robot. In Robotics: Science and Systems 2014. Berkeley, CA, USA, July 12–16, 2014.
International Federation of Robotics. (2018). Executive Summary World Robotics 2018 Service Robots.
Iwasaki, M., Zhou, J., Ikeda, M., Kawamura, T., & Nakanishi, H. (2018). A customer’s attitude to a robotic salesperson depends on their initial interaction. In 27th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN2018). Nanjing and Tai’an, China.
Kanda, T., Shiomi, M., Miyashita, Z., Ishiguro, H., & Hagita, N. (2010). A communication robot in a shopping mall. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 26(5), 897–913.
Kobayashi, Y., Yamazaki, S., Takahashi, H., Fukuda, H., & Kuno, Y. (2019). Robotic shopping trolley for supporting the elderly. In N. Lightner (ed), Advances in Human Factors and Ergonomics in Healthcare and Medical Devices. AHFE 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (Vol. 779, pp. 344–353). Cham: Springer. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94373-2_38.
Korn, O., Bieber, G., & Fron, C. (2018). Perspectives on social robots: From the historic background to an experts’ view on future developments. In Proceedings of the 11th Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference (pp. 186–193). http://doi.org/10.1145/3197768.3197774.
Lai, C.-J., & Tsai, C.-P. (2018). Design of introducing service robot into catering services. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Service Robotics Technologies-ICSRT ’18 - ICSRT ’18 (pp. 62–66). New York, NY, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/3208833.3208837.
Lazar, J., Feng, J. H., & Hochheiser, H. (2010). Research methods in human-computer interaction. Hoboken: Wiley.
Loup Ventures. (n.d.). Unit sales of social and entertainment robots worldwide from 2015 to 2025 (in millions). In Statista—The Statistics Portal. Retrieved November 30, 2018, from https://www.statista.com/statistics/755677/social-and-entertainment-robot-sales-worldwide/.
Niemelä, M., Arvola, A., & Aaltonen, I. (2017). Monitoring the acceptance of a social service robot in a shopping mall: First results. In Proceedings of the Companion of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’17) (pp. 225–226). Vienna, March 6–9. http://doi.org/10.1145/3029798.3038333.
Niemelä, M., Heikkilä, P., & Lammi, H. (2017). A social service robot in a shopping mall—Expectations of the management, retailers and consumers. In Proceedings of the Companion of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’17) (pp. 227–228). Vienna, March 6–9. http://doi.org/10.1145/3029798.3038301.
Niemelä, M., Heikkilä, P., Lammi, H., & Oksman, V. (2017). Shopping mall robots—Opportunities and constraints from the retailer and manager perspective. In A. Kheddar (Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 10652, pp. 485–494). Springer International Publishing AG 2017.
Pandey, A. K., & Gelin, R. (2018). A mass-produced sociable humanoid robot: Pepper: The first machine of its kind. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 25(3), 40–48. https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2018.2833157.
Papaioannou, I., Curry, A. C., Part, J. L., Shalyminov, I., Xu, X., Yu, Y. … Lemon, O. (2017). Alana: Social dialogue using an ensemble model and a ranker trained on user feedback. In 1st Proceedings of Alexa Prize (Alexa Prize 2017). https://s3.amazonaws.com/alexaprize/2017/technical-article/alana.pdf.
Sabelli, A. M., & Kanda, T. (2016). Robovie as a mascot: A qualitative study for long-term presence of robots in a shopping mall. International Journal of Social Robotics, 8(2), 211–221. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-015-0332-9.
Schneider, T., Hee Hong, G., & Van Le, A. (2018). Managing Japan’s shrinking labor force with AI and robots. IMF F&D Magazine—June 2018.
Shi, C., Satake, S., Kanda, T., & Ishiguro, H. (2016). How would store managers employ social robots? In ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Vol. 2016–April, pp. 519–520). IEEE. http://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2016.7451835.
Shi, C., Satake, S., Kanda, T., & Ishiguro, H. (2018). A robot that distributes flyers to pedestrians in a shopping mall. International Journal of Social Robotics, 10(4), 421–437. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0442-7.
Shiomi, M., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., & Hagita, N. (2006). Interactive humanoid robots for a science museum. In Proceeding of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART Conference on Human-Robot Interaction - HRI ’06. http://doi.org/10.1145/1121241.1121293.
Shiomi, M., Shinozawa, K., Nakagawa, Y., Miyashita, T., Sakamoto, T., Terakubo, T. … Hagita, N. (2013). Recommendation effects of a social robot for advertisement-use context in a shopping mall. International Journal of Social Robotics, 5(2), 251–262. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-013-0180-4.
Acknowledgements
This research is part of the project MuMMER, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 688147.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Niemelä, M., Heikkilä, P., Lammi, H., Oksman, V. (2019). A Social Robot in a Shopping Mall: Studies on Acceptance and Stakeholder Expectations. In: Korn, O. (eds) Social Robots: Technological, Societal and Ethical Aspects of Human-Robot Interaction. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17107-0_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17107-0_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-17106-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-17107-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)