Pilot Study of Person Robot Interaction in a Public Transit Space

Abstract

This paper describes a study of the effect of a human interactive robot placed in an urban transit space. The underlying hypothesis is that it is possible to create interesting new living spaces and induce value in terms of experiences, information or economics, by putting socially interactive mobile agents into public urban transit area. To investigate the hypothesis, an experiment was carried out at a bus terminal serving both as a transit space and a shopping mall, where an autonomous robot were to detect and follow random people. The people that were followed were asked to fill out a questionnaire for quantitative analysis of the experiment. In addition video documentation of the experiment was used in the evaluation. The results showed that people were generally positive towards having mobile robots in this type of environment where shopping is combined with transit. However, it also showed harder than expected to start interaction with commuters due to their determination and speed towards their goal. Further it was demonstrated that it was possible to track and follow people, who were not beforehand informed on the experiment. The evaluation indicated, that the distance to initiate interaction was shorter than initially expected, but complies with the distance for normal human to human interaction.

Escaping from Children's Abuse of Social Robots

“…For instance, previous studies revealed robots can be successfully used in a museum [1,2], supermarket [3], transit station [4], or urban sidewalk [5]. All these works reported that people exhibit great curiosity and actively interact with robots.…”

Ethological evaluation of human-robot Interaction: Are children more efficient and motivated with computer, virtual agent or robots?

“…Our experimentation studied the influence of three animated objects whereas most of the others focused on one object (Nabe et al [18], Svenstrup et al [19], Weiss et al [20] and Beran et al [21]). …”

Navigation Among Humans

“…Feil-Seifer & Mataric (2005); Xavier et al (2005). Our implementation is robust for tracking people at speeds of up to 2 m s in a real-world public space, which is described in Svenstrup et al (2008). The next step is to estimate velocity vector of the person in the robot's coordinate frame.…”