Abstract
In this paper we present a user evaluation study on location at the Royal Alcázar in Seville, Spain, with the fully autonomous tour guide robot FROG. In this robot, technological innovations in navigation and vision were integrated with state-of-the-art design for robot behavior in order to provide interactive tours and adaptive content to visitors. In our user evaluation study we aimed to gain insights in user experiences of and attitudes and responses towards this fully autonomous social robot. Such studies are important, because they provide information about how people interact with social robots outside a controlled setting. Invited as well as spontaneous visitors followed tours guided by FROG and were interviewed about their opinions and experiences. Our findings indicate that even if isolated technical features work perfectly in controlled settings, they might not work well in the integrated system, because naïve people interact with the system in an unforeseen manner.
The research leading to these results received funding from the EC’s 7th Framework program under Grant agreement 288235. http://www.frogrobot.eu. We thank the entire EU FP7 FROG-team for technically enabling these user experience tours.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Burgard, W., Cremers, A.B., Fox, D., Hähnel, D., Lakemeyer, G., Schulz, D., Steiner, W., Thrun, S.: Experiences with an interactive museum tour-guide robot. Artif. Intell. 114(1), 3–55 (1999)
Thrun, S., Bennewitz, M., Burgard, W., Cremers, A.B., Dellaert, F., Fox, D., Hahnel, D., Rosenberg, C., Roy, N., Schulte, J., Schulz, D.: MINERVA: a second-generation museum tour-guide robot. In: Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, vol. 3, no. May, pp. 1999–2005 (1999)
Yamazaki, A., Yamazaki, K., Kuno, Y., Burdelski, M., Kawashima, M., Kuzuoka, H.: Precision timing in human-robot interaction : coordination of head movement and utterance. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 131–139 (2008)
Pitsch, K., Gehle, R., Wrede, S.: Addressing multiple participants : a museum robot’ s gaze shapes visitor participation. In: International Conference on Social Robotics, pp. 587–588 (2013)
Yousuf, M.A., Kobayashi, Y., Kuno, Y., Yamazaki, A., Yamazaki, K.: How to move towards visitors: a model for museum guide robots to initiate conversation. In: 2013 IEEE RO-MAN, pp. 587–592 (2013)
Donner, M., Himstedt, M., Hellbach, S., Boehme, H.-J.: Awakening history : preparing a museum tour guide robot for augmenting exhibits. In: European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR), pp. 337–342 (2013)
Nourbakhsh, I.R., Kunz, C., Willeke, T.: The mobot museum robot installations: a five year experiment. In: 2003 IEEE/RJS International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp. 3636–3641 (2003)
Jensen, B., Tomatis, N., Mayor, L., Drygajlo, A., Siegwart, R.: Robots meet Humans-interaction in public spaces. IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron. 52(6), 1530–1546 (2005)
Shiomi, M., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., Hagita, N.: Interactive humanoid robots for a science museum. In: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction, pp. 305–312 (2006)
Clodic, A., Fleury, S., Alami, R., Chatila, R., Bailly, G., Brèthes, L., Cottret, M., Danès, P., Dollat, X., Eliseï, F., Ferrané, I., Herrb, M., Infantes, G., Lemaire, C., Lerasle, F., Manhes, J., Marcoul, P., Menezes, P., Montreuil, V.: Rackham: an interactive robot-guide. In: 2006 IEEE ROMAN, pp. 502–509 (2006)
Sabanovic, S., Michalowski, M.P., Simmons, R.: Robots in the wild: observing human-robot social interaction outside the lab. In: 9th IEEE International Workshop on Advanced Motion Control, pp. 576–581. IEEE (2006)
Ramón-Vigo, R., Perez-Higueras, N., Caballero, F., Merino, L.: Transferring human navigation behaviors into a robot local planner. In: 2014 IEEE RO-MAN, pp. 774–779 (2014)
Flohr, F., Dumitru-Guzu, M., Kooij, J.F.P., Gavrila, D.M.: Joint probabilistic pedestrian head and body orientation estimation. IEEE Trans. Intell. Transp. Syst. PP(99) (2015)
Marras, I., Tzimiropoulos, G., Zafeiriou, S., Pantic, M.: Online learning and fusion of orientation appearance models for robust rigid object tracking. Image Vis. Comput. 32(10), 707–727 (2014)
Hernández Núñez, J.C., Morales, A.J.: The Royal Palace of Seville. Scala Arts Publishers, Inc. (1999)
Karreman, D.E., van Dijk, E.M.A.G., Evers, V.: Using the visitor experiences for mapping the possibilities of implementing a robotic guide in outdoor sites. In: 2012 IEEE RO-MAN, pp. 1059–1065 (2012)
Friese, S.: Qualitative data analysis with ATLAS.ti, 2nd edn. Sage (2014)
“Atlas.ti.” 7.5.6 (Computer Software), Atlas.ti GMBH, Berlin. www.atlasti.com
Heath, C., vom Lehn, D.: Configuring ‘Interactivity’: Enhancing Engagement in Science Centres and Museums. Soc. Stud. Sci. 38(1), 63–91 (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Karreman, D., Ludden, G., Evers, V. (2015). Visiting Cultural Heritage with a Tour Guide Robot: A User Evaluation Study in-the-Wild. In: Tapus, A., André, E., Martin, JC., Ferland, F., Ammi, M. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9388. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_32
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-25553-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-25554-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)