Adaptive Strategies for Multi-party Interactions with Robots in Public Spaces

Abstract

In order to inform the important considerations when designing robotic applications for public spaces, the focus of this research is to investigate what socio-psychological effects should influence robot’s decision-making within public environments. Social environments are often complex and ambiguous: many queries to the robot are collaborative (e.g. a family), but in case of conflicting queries, social robots need to participate in value decisions and negotiating multi-party interactions. With the aim to investigate who should robots adapt to (children or adults) in multi-party situations within human-robot interactions in public spaces, this paper presents a real-world study conducted in a shopping mall. The results include a number of interesting findings based on people’s relationship with a child and their parental status.