A Social Robot in a Shopping Mall: Studies on Acceptance and Stakeholder Expectations

Abstract

Social robots are gradually being introduced in public places to perform various service tasks in which the robots interact with users in the service front line. The presence of social robots in stores and shopping malls is one noticeable aspect of this phenomenon. Customers tend to feel positive about such robots, but the long-term benefits and impact of social service robots are hard to estimate, especially from the business perspective. The MuMMER project has involved mall customers, store managers, and mall managers to study their expectations and concerns about a shopping mall robot. Pepper of SoftBank Robotics was used as the robot platform. All stakeholders showed mainly positive attitudes. Facilitating factors in the adoption of social robots in malls seem to be the capability of the robot to be both entertaining and useful; in particular, the robot requires advanced dialog capability in order to be able to serve customers and collaborate with personnel. Moreover, there needs to be a perceived potential of the robot to lead to increased sales or decreased costs in the mall. As part of the adoption of social robots in shopping malls, the mall and store staff should be involved in co-designing the robots’ tasks, and roles, as their work will be influenced by the robots in many ways.