Using multiple robots to increase suggestion persuasiveness in public space

Abstract

Though existing social robots can already be used in a variety of applications, there are technical limitations to their use, especially outside the laboratory, and humans do not fully trust or recognize them. Considering these problems, a method to make humans accept a robot’s suggestion more easily was investigated. An idea called “sequential persuasion” was developed to use multiple robots distant from each other to deliver small messages, rather than a single robot for the entire interaction. To experimentally validate this concept, a field experiment was performed on a university campus. Two bottles of hand sanitizer were placed in one of the entrances to a building, and their usage was observed under three different conditions: no robot, one robot, and three robots. As people passed through the entrance corridor, the robots promoted the usage of the hand sanitizers. After several days of testing, it was found that the usage increased progressively from no robot to one robot to three robots, indicating that the number of robots influenced the behavior of the humans.