Chat and Appearance Effects for Robots which Assist Elderly's Shopping

Abstract

The rapid advancement of robotics has enabled the robots to serve physical help for elderly people in everyday life. This paper investigates what types of robot elderly the most willing to go shopping with. We investigate the effect into following two factors: conversation and robot-type. Conversation means the no purpose talking which human often do. For robot-type, we prepare humanoid and cart robot. To investigate the effect of these factors, a field experiment was conducted in a real supermarket where 24 elderly participants shopped with robots. The experimental results revealed that they prefer a conversational humanoid as a shopping assistant partner. 1. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Fig. 1 [6] Fig. 1 A scenario where the elderly and the robot shopping at the real supermarket