Hiroyuki Kidokoro

Escaping from Children's Abuse of Social Robots

Social robots working in public space often stimulate childrens curiosity. However, sometimes children also show abusive behavior toward robots. In our case studies, we observed in many cases that children persistently obstruct the robots activity. Some actually abused the robot by saying bad things, and at times even kicking or punching the robot. We developed a statistical model of occurrence of childrens abuse. Using this model together with a simulator of pedestrian behavior, we enabled the robot to predict the possibility of an abuse situation and escape before it happens. We demonstrated that with the model the robot successfully lowered the occurrence of abuse in a real shopping mall. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - Interaction styles; I.2.9 [Artificial Intelligence]: Robotics, General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors.

Cooperative customer navigation between robots outside and inside a retail shop—an implementation on the ubiquitous market platform

Applying the technologies of a network robot system, recommendation methods used in e-commerce are incorporated in a retail shop in the real world. We constructed a platform for ubiquitous networked robots that focuses on a shop environment where communication robots perform customer navigation. The platform observes customers’ purchasing behavior by networked sensors, including a laser range finder-based human position tracking system, and then controls visible-type communication robots in the environment to perform customer navigation. Two types of navigation scenarios are implemented and investigated in experiments using 80 participants. The results indicate that the participants in the cooperative navigation scenario, who interacted with communication robots located both outside and inside the shop, felt friendliness toward the robots and found it easy to understand what the robots said.

You stopped by there? I recommend this: changing customer behaviors with robots

This paper proposes a method that estimates customer interests by identifying a set of areas at which a customer has stopped in our experimental shop environment and recommends items through robots located on the shops shelves. We experimentally verified that our method changed customer behaviors. The results show that the method successfully encouraged customers to visit the shelves of recommended items.

Why Do Children Abuse Robots

We found that children sometimes abuse a social robot in a hallway of a shopping mall. They spoke bad words, repeatedly obstructed the robots path, and sometimes even kicked and punched the robot. To investigate why they abused it, we conducted a field study, in which we let visiting children freely interact with the robot, and interviewed when they engaged in a serious abusive behavior including physical contacts. In total, we obtained valid interviews from twenty-three children over 13 days of observations. They are aged between five and nine. Adults and older children were rarely involved. We interviewed them to know whether they perceived the robot as human-like others, why they abused it, and whether they thought that the robot would suffer from their abusive behavior. We found that 1) the majority of the children abused because they were curious about the robots reactions or enjoyed abusing it while considering it as human-like, and 2) about half of the children believed in the capability of the robot to perceive their abusive behaviors.

Effectiveness of Cooperative Customer Navigation from Robots around a Retail Shop

Applying the technologies of a network robot system, we incorporate the recommendation methods used in E-commerce in a retail shop in the real world. We constructed a platform for ubiquitous-networked robots that focuses on a shop environment where communication robots perform customer navigation. The platform estimates customer interests from their pre-purchasing behaviors observed by networked sensors without concrete IDs and controls visible-type communication robots in the environment to perform customer navigation. The system can perform collaborative filtering-based recommendations without excessively intruding upon the privacy of customers. Since observations and recommendations in real environments are intrinsically annoying, the robot scenarios are also important for interacting with customers as well as the system. Two types of navigation scenarios are implemented and investigated in experiments using 80 participants. The results indicate that in the cooperative navigation scenario, the participants who interacted with the communication robots located both outside and inside the shop felt friendlier toward the robots and found it easy to understand what they said.

Paranga: a book-shaped device with tactile feedback

A flipbook is the one of plays featuring page-turning action that is familiar to us in our life. It gives us not only funny visual feedback that a written character looks as if it moves, but also tactile information when pieces of paper touch users thumb page by page. In recent e-reader devices such as iPad, we can also see page-flipping animations when users turn pages. E-book generally does not provide any tactile feelings of paper in reading a book.