Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
humanoid robot
user acceptance
public spaces
human-robot interaction
response time
A Case Study on the Acceptance of a Humanoid Robotic Head Employed in Three Public Spaces
🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates user acceptance of a humanoid robotic head in diverse public spaces and the factors influencing it. Deploying an anthropomorphic robotic head equipped with multilingual natural language processing and multimodal affective expression capabilities across three real-world settings—tourist information centers, urban libraries, and technology exhibition halls—we invited visitors to interact in their native languages and assessed acceptance using the TAM2 model. This work presents the first systematic field evaluation of how embodied affective interaction influences human–robot acceptance across multiple environments. Results indicate that users generally perceived the system as useful and easy to use, particularly in information centers and libraries. Multilingual support received positive feedback, though approximately 20% of users noted that response latency impaired conversational fluency.
📝 Abstract
Previous research has shown that a human-like robot's acceptance heavily depends on the setting in which it operates and its ability to perform relevant tasks. This paper, first, reports on how our robot processes natural language to generate a multimodal, verbal response integrating emotional expressions based on an emotion simulation backend. Then, it describes how visitors were invited to speak with our robot in their own language at three different, public locations, where the robot was running continuously for several days. The TAM2 questionnaire results reveal that on average users were motivated to use the robot and found it rather useful and easy to use regardless of the specific location. However, public spaces like the tourist information and the city library seem to be a better fit for our interactive, robotic head than an office environment such as the building authority, where the willingness to interact was lower. Overall, the robot's multi-lingual responses were very much appreciated, but every fifth user found the response time too slow impeding the dialog flow, which remains to be improved in future work.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
multimodal interaction
emotion simulation
natural language processing
humanoid robot
public space deployment
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