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Field Trial of an Autonomous Shopworker Robot that Aims to Provide Friendly Encouragement and Exert Social Pressure

Published: 11 March 2024 Publication History

Abstract

We developed an autonomous hatshop robot for encouraging customers to try on hats by providing comments that appropriately fit their actions, and in such a way also indirectly exerting social pressure. To enable it to offer such a service smoothly in a real shop, we developed a large system (around 150k lines of code with 23 ROS packages) integrated with various technologies, like people tracking, shopping activity recognition and navigation. The robot needed to move in narrow corridors, detect customers, and recognise their shopping activities. We employed an iterative development process, repeating trial-and-error integration with the robot in the actual shop, while also collecting real-world data during field-testing. This process enabled us to improve our shopping activity recognition system by collecting real-world data, and to adapt our software modules to the target shop environment. We report the lessons learnt during our system development process. The results of our 11-day field trial show that our robot was able to provide its services reasonably well. Many customers expressed a positive impression of the robot and its services.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Electrophysiological Measures for Human–Robot Collaboration Quality AssessmentDiscovering the Frontiers of Human-Robot Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-66656-8_15(363-380)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HRI '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
    March 2024
    982 pages
    ISBN:9798400703225
    DOI:10.1145/3610977
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    Published: 11 March 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. field trial
    2. shopping activity recognition
    3. shopworker robot

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    • JST, CREST
    • JSPS, KAKENHI
    • JST, AIP Trilateral AI Research
    • JST, Moonshot R&D

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    • (2024)Electrophysiological Measures for Human–Robot Collaboration Quality AssessmentDiscovering the Frontiers of Human-Robot Interaction10.1007/978-3-031-66656-8_15(363-380)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024

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