What Is Your Other Hand Doing, Robot? A Model of Behavior for Shopkeeper Robot's Idle Hand

In retail settings, a robot's one-handed manipulation of objects can come across as thoughtless and impolite, thus creating a negative customer experience. To solve this problem, we first observed how human shopkeepers interact with customers, specifically focusing on their hand movements durin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2024 19th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) pp. 552 - 560
Main Authors Pan, Xiang, Doering, Malcolm, Kanda, Takayuki
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Japanese
Published ACM 11.03.2024
Subjects
Competence
Computational modeling
Focusing
Human computer interaction
Human-robot interaction
Idle hand motion
Object recognition
Organizations
Politeness
Robot kinematics
Support hand behavior
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Summary:In retail settings, a robot's one-handed manipulation of objects can come across as thoughtless and impolite, thus creating a negative customer experience. To solve this problem, we first observed how human shopkeepers interact with customers, specifically focusing on their hand movements during object manipulation. From the observation and analysis of shopkeepers' hand movements, we identified an essential element of their idle hand movements: "support" provided by the idle hand as the primary hand manipulates an object. Based on this observation, we proposed a model that coordinates the movements of a robot's idle hand with its primary task-engaged hand, emphasizing its supportive behaviors. In a within-subjects study, 20 participants interacted with robot shopkeepers under different conditions to assess the impact of incorporating support behavior with the idle hand. The results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms a baseline in terms of politeness and competence, suggesting enhanced object-based interactions between the robot shopkeepers and customers.CCS CONCEPTS * Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); * Computer systems organization → Robotics.
DOI:10.1145/3610977.3634986