Field Trial of a Shopworker Robot with Friendly Guidance and Appropriate Admonishments

We developed an admonishing service for a shopworker robot and conducted a field trial to investigate the impressions of a shop’s staff and customers. Applying the admonishing service in a real-world robot is difficult due to the high risk of rejection by society. We wanted to achieve an acceptable admonishing service while simultaneously avoiding the impression of a forceful request from a machine. We proposed a harmonized design that provided friendly and admonishing services. First, we interviewed a shop’s staff to learn their strategies for both friendly and admonishing services. From our evaluation of the interview results, we derived three design principles: friendly impressions, zero erroneous admonishments, and polite requests. Based on the design principles, we implemented our harmonized design on a social robot that guides customers to product locations and admonishes those who are not wearing face masks. We conducted a 13-day field trial in a retail shop and interviewed the customers and shopworkers to learn their impressions of our robot. The results of the field trial imply that our harmonized design approach is successful. Both the customers and the shop staff had overall positive impressions of the robot, its admonishing and friendly services, and expressed an intention to use it in the future. Furthermore, we studied the robot’s autonomous service-providing capability in the field and conducted an evaluation with hired participants to deepen our study of the robot’s mask recognition capability.