iCharibot: Design and Field Trials of a Fundraising Robot

Abstract

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 passersby, 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.

Socially contingent humanoid robot head behaviour results in increased charity donations

“…The domain of charity collection provides an ideal testcase for such explorations, in part due to the clear means of assessing the difference in contributions per condition (and of course the social contribution made through the money collected). There has been some limited prior work involving charity collecting robots, most notably the iCharibot [4]: in this study involving a wheeled mobile robot with simplified face displayed on a screen, interactivity was found to increase donation amounts over only attracting behaviours and a passive benchmark. The present study differs from, and extends, this prior work in a number of ways.…”

“…The number of people who donated, and the individual amounts donated, were not recorded (for technical reasons). This makes it difficult to assess the extent of the differences in donation behaviour between the two conditions, apart from the overall donation amount, in a manner similar to prior work [4].…”

“…Firstly, we employ a static robot, comprised only of shoulders and head: with a retroprojected face, however, we have the capability to implement a wide range of facial animations, including gaze behaviours (figure 1). Secondly, rather than manipulate interaction content as well as robot behaviour as in [4], we focus only on manipulating the robot's socially-contingent behaviour. In this way, we seek to assess the specific contribution of the robot behaviour on people's charity donation behaviour.…”

Robot–City Interaction: Mapping the Research Landscape—A Survey of the Interactions Between Robots and Modern Cities

“…Indeed, many of the selected works focus on advanced navigation algorithms combined with state-of-the-art sensor technologies [29,38,56,57,62,90]. Verbal communication and acquisition, which are medium-sized in the figure, are also somewhat common: This happens mostly in contexts where robots are required to interact with the citizens to achieve their goals, as in [30,39,45,53,69,87]. The ability of management is mostly employed in combination with perception and navigation-typically scenarios involving more than one robot, e.g.…”

“…High (22) 33.3% narios where the human presence is not necessary, such as driverless cars [3,25,40,51,61,110,112] and infrastructure maintenance [17,41,59,67,76,86,89]; on the contrary, a low to medium level of autonomy is observed when citizens are involved, both through public engagement [13,22,30,49,53,87,88,109] and personal assistance [10,39,45,69,83].…”