Field trial of an information-providing robot in a shopping mall

Abstract

We developed an information-providing robot for a shopping mall. It moves around and hands over flyers about the mall and when people are interested or approach the robot to obtain some information, it starts the information-providing service. During the information-providing service, it provides directions and recommendations of shops in the mall. The robot is developed to be fully autonomous, but due to low performance in automatic speech recognition, this function is overtaken by a human operator. In our field trial, the robot worked for 53.4 hours (over 11 days) without any major failure (83.5% of time autonomously operated). We conducted interviews with visitors, and revealed that the majority of them found the information from the robot useful, and wanted to use it again.