Abstract
In this work, we address the problem of increasing charitable donations through a novel, engaging fundraising robot: the Imperial Charity Robot (iCharibot). To better understand how to engage passers-by, we conducted a field trial in outdoor locations at a busy area in London, spread across 9 sessions of 40 minutes each. During our experiments, iCharibot attracted 679 people and engaged with 386 individuals. Our results show that interactivity led to longer user engagement with the robot. Our data further suggests both saliency and interactivity led to an increase in the total donation amount. These findings should prove useful for future design of robotic fundraisers in particular and for social robots in general.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bauer, A., Klasing, K., Lidoris, G., Mühlbauer, Q., Rohrmüller, F., Sosnowski, S., Xu, T., Kühnlenz, K., Wollherr, D., Buss, M.: The autonomous city explorer: Towards natural human-robot interaction in urban environments. Intl. J. of Social Robot. 1(2), 127–140 (2009)
Breazeal, C.: Emotion and sociable humanoid robots. Intl. J. Human-Computer Stud. 59(1-2), 119–155 (2003)
Burgard, W., Cremers, A., Fox, D., Hähnel, D., Lakemeyer, G., Schulz, D., Steiner, W., Thrun, S.: Experiences with an interactive museum tour-guide robot. Artif. Intell. 114(1-2), 3–55 (1999)
Clark, R.A., Richmond, K., King, S.: Festival 2 – Build Your Own General Purpose Unit Selection Speech Synthesiser. In: Proc. of ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop, pp. 173–178 (2004)
Dobbs, J., Jochum, V., Wilding, K., Lipscomb, L., Smith, M., Harrison, R.: UK Giving 2011: An overview of charitable giving in the UK (2011)
Goetz, J., Kiesler, S., Powers, A.: Matching robot appearance and behavior to tasks to improve human-robot cooperation. In: Proc. of IEEE RO-MAN, pp. 55–60 (2003)
Kim, M.S., Cha, B.K., Park, D.M., Lee, S.M., Kwak, S., Lee, M.K.: Dona: Urban Donation Motivating Robot. In: Proc. of ACM/IEEE HRI, pp. 159–160 (2010)
La Russa, G., Sutinen, E., Cronje, J.C.: When a robot turns into a totem: The RoboBeggar case. In: Soomro, S. (ed.) E-learning Experiences and Future, ch. 17, pp. 327–344. InTech (2010)
Lindskold, S., Forte, R.A., Haake, C.S., Schmidt, E.K.: The Effects of Directness of Face-to-Face Requests and Sex of Solicitor on Streetcorner Donations. J. of Social Psychology 101, 45–51 (1977)
Mori, M.: The uncanny valley. Energy 7(4), 33–35 (1970)
Quigley, M., Gerkey, B., Conley, K., Faust, J., Foote, T., Leibs, J., Berger, E., Wheeler, R., Ng, A.: ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System. In: Proc. of the Open Source Software Workshop at ICRA (2009)
Shiomi, M., Sakamoto, D., Kanda, T., Ishi, C.T., Ishiguro, H., Hagita, N.: Field Trial of a Networked Robot at a Train Station. Intl. J. of Social Robot. 3(1), 27–40 (2010)
Thrun, S., Bennewitz, M., Burgard, W., Cremers, A., Dellaert, F., Fox, D., Hahnel, D., Rosenberg, C., Roy, N., Schulte, J., et al.: MINERVA: A second-generation museum tour-guide robot. In: Proc. of IEEE ICRA, pp. 1999–2005 (1999)
Weiss, A., Bernhaupt, R., Tscheligi, M., Wollherr, D., Kuhnlenz, K., Buss, M.: A methodological variation for acceptance evaluation of Human-Robot Interaction in public places. In: Proc. of IEEE RO-MAN, pp. 713–718 (2008)
Yuasa, M., Saito, K., Mukawa, N.: Brain activity associated with graphic emoticons. The effect of abstract faces in communication over a computer network. Electrical Engineering in Japan 177(3), 36–45 (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Sarabia, M. et al. (2013). iCharibot: Design and Field Trials of a Fundraising Robot. In: Herrmann, G., Pearson, M.J., Lenz, A., Bremner, P., Spiers, A., Leonards, U. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02675-6_41
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02675-6_41
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-02674-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02675-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)