Comparing task-based and socially intelligent behaviour in a robot bartender

Giuliani M., Petrick R., Foster M.E., Gaschler A., Isard A., Pateraki M., Sigalas M., 2013. Comparing task-based and socially intelligent behaviour in a robot bartender. In Proc. of the 15th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2013), 9-13 December, Sydney, Australia. [doi] [pdf] [bib]

Abstract: We address the question of whether service robots that interact with humans in public spaces must express socially appropriate behaviour. To do so, we implemented a robot bartender which is able to take drink orders from humans and serve drinks to them. By using a highlevel automated planner, we explore two di fferent robot interaction styles: in the task only setting, the robot simply fulfils its goal of asking customers for drink orders and serving them drinks; in the socially intelligent setting, the robot additionally acts in a manner socially appropriate to the bartender scenario, based on the behaviour of humans observed in natural bar interactions. The results of a user study show that the interactions with the socially intelligent robot were somewhat more efficient, but the two implemented behaviour settings had only a small influence on the subjective ratings. However, there were objective factors that influenced participant ratings: the overall duration of the interaction had a positive influence on the ratings, while the number of system order requests had a negative influence. We also found a cultural diff erence: German participants gave the system higher pre-test ratings than participants who interacted in English, although the post-test scores were similar.

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