This extended abstract concerns the FP7-project Spencer. As part of the Spencer project, a demonstrator robot will be developed which provide services to passengers at a major European airport. Example services include (1) guiding transfer passengers from their arrival gate to the so-called Schengen barrier, and (2) assisting in the transfer process by printing boarding passes. The goal of the robot is to make sure that passengers will make their connecting  flight, with our own focus being on the human-robot interaction. In the following, we describe a sample use case of the project scenario. Based on this we identify possible challenges that are of interest with respect to interactive robots in public spaces

Evers, Vanessa

Joosse, Michiel

Lohse, Manja

This extended abstract concerns the FP7-project Spencer. As part of the Spencer project, a demonstrator robot will be developed which provide services to passengers at a major European airport. Example services include (1) guiding transfer passengers from their arrival gate to the so-called Schengen barrier, and (2) assisting in the transfer process by printing boarding passes. The goal of the robot is to make sure that passengers will make their connecting flight, with our own focus being on the human-robot interaction. In the following, we describe a sample use case of the project scenario. Based on this we identify possible challenges that are of interest with respect to interactive robots in public spaces

Joosse, M.P.

Lohse, M.

University of Twente Research Information

Short Duration Robot Interaction at an Airport:Challenges from a Socio-Psychological Point ofViewMichiel Joosse, Manja Lohse, and Vanessa EversHuman Media Interaction, University of Twente, the Netherlandsm.p.joosse, m.lohse, v.evers@utwente.nl1 IntroductionThis extended abstract concerns the FP7-project Spencer1. As part of the Spencerproject, a demonstrator robot will be developed which provide services to passen-gers at a major European airport. Example services include (1) guiding transferpassengers from their arrival gate to the so-called Schengen barrier, and (2) as-sisting in the transfer process by printing boarding passes. The goal of the robotis to make sure that passengers will make their connecting flight, with our ownfocus being on the human-robot interaction. In the following, we describe a sam-ple use case of the project scenario. Based on this we identify possible challengesthat are of interest with respect to interactive robots in public spaces.2 Use caseThe Spencer project aims to develop and deploy a demonstrator service robotwhich can provide assistance to transferring passengers at a major airport inEurope. The industrial partner has about 25.000 transfer passengers daily. Alarge portion of these passengers transfer from (intercontinental) non-Schengenflights to (European) Schengen flights, requiring passengers to go through apassport control before arriving at their next departure gate. This process coststime, and is one of the major sources why passenger miss their connecting flights.The Spencer robot is envisioned to collect a group of transfer passengerswith a minimal connection time at the gate (for example they could make theirconnection if they hurry and go to the fast-track Schengen lane). The Spencerrobot will guide them towards the fast-track Schengen lane, after which theycan proceed to their departure gate. An average group of transfer passengersconstitutes between 20-40 people, who do not necessarily know each other; theironly common denominator is their next flight.Scientific challenges for the Spencer project include (among others) sociallyintelligent navigation and the detection of groups of people and relations withinthese groups. The scientific challenge we are focusing on, is the evaluation anddesign of (spatial) robot behaviors that are experienced as (socially) normative.1 http://www.spencer.eu3 HRI challenges for the Spencer robotThe use case as described above contains both technical and scientific challenges.In this section, we will focus on what we believe as being the most importantchallenges for the interaction between passengers and a robot.3.1 Normative behavior: it is about intention recognitionIndependent of the ways by which the robot conveys its intentions, the robotshould be perceived as behaving in a normative way. Thus, the behavior of therobot should conform to the social norms expected by the current passengers.Examples of these normative behaviors could include adjusting the speed tothe group, and giving way to people approaching from the right. While theimplementation of these issues could be considered technical ones, we believethe identification of the norms is a socio-psychological problem.We believe that because - for most people - flying is not considered to be aneveryday activity; many people consider it to be hectic, and are sometime unsureof what (not) to do or where to go. This makes it especially important that themessages a robot transmit, for instance those which convey its movement, areclear and predictable.At airports identifying normative behavior is particularly complicated in partbecause the robot will have to deal with people with different cultural back-grounds. These might even form part of one group that has to be guided at thesame time. Also the fact that we have to deal with groups as such is a challengefor behavior planning and other technical requirements such as robust spokenlanguage processing and person tracking.Thus, there are two distinct different normative behaviors we consider in thisextended abstract. One the one hand we argue that the movement of the robotshould be legible and conveying towards the passengers. On the other hand, therobot has to behave in a normative way in the sense that it abides with the(un)written conventions of pedestrian traffic.3.2 Communication ModalitiesTo address the issue of legible and conveying movement, one can think of differentmodalities which could be useful to communicate intent. Whereas humans canuse non-verbal communications to exchange social signals when approachingone another [2], robots are not (yet) capable of this. We propose to evaluate twodifferent communication modalities for the robot, each having pro’s and con’s inthe context of an airport.Speech or sound in general, could be one of these modalities. Due to the multi-cultural mix of passengers these messages would ideally be universal. A solutioncan be to implement a text-to-speech engine in the robot, or a noise-like level asdescribed in [1]. Since an airport is a noisy environment, the robot has to repeatthe messages.A graphical interface could also be used to convey movement intentions, forinstance a screen, indicating the robot’s speed or acceleration. This would belimited in that it can only supply information to those who can see the screen;people who are moving behind, or next to, the robot.Both modalities could be used to communicate intent to passengers. Weintend to test both modalities synchronous and asynchronous in order for therobot to communicate as effective as possible.3.3 Research approachThe Media Equation states that people treat computers, and related media, as ifthey were people [3]. Based upon this work of Nass and colleagues, our approachis to first identify what people do, implement similar behaviors on a robot, andevaluate whether human norms hold for human-robot interaction.We do not expect that human normative behavior will unequivocally carryover to normative robot behavior, however, we will use it as a starting point.Based upon a literature review and a contextual analysis (systematic observa-tion of what really happens), we will design and implement normative behaviorsfor a robot. These behaviors will first be tested in lab studies, followed by exper-iments at the site of the industrial partner; the airport in order to get an ideaof the experiences of the passengers.To get insight in the experiences of passengers at the airport, we can employseveral methods for user studies. Examples include self-reported questionnaires,coding of video data and analysis of one’s galvanic skin response.For our experiments, we will primarily collect video data, as well as subjectivequestionnaires or -interviews. Objective video data makes it easy to capturecertain behavioral responses from multiple people in a short time. However,legal and organizational issues (such as privacy and security) could hinder thismethod when used outside the lab. Interviews and questionnaires should be ableto capture the required data in only a few questions, given that passengers will belikely be in a hurry. These languages should be unambiguous for passengers withdifferent cultures; this raises the question if the language should be native, oruniversal (read: English). Different languages would require multiple iterationsof translation and back translation to ensure the questions truly ask the same.In light of the issues described above we may have to rethink our data col-lection methods. This also holds for the data the robot collects for its own per-ception. Prior to evaluation in a real-world setting, behavior will be evaluated ina more controlled setting. This could be in a lab setting as for example in [1, 4],but also by other ways, for instance by using videos of a robot interacting withpeople [5].4 ConclusionIn this extended abstract we have described challenges from a socio-psychologicalpoint of view when a robot interacts with users at an airport. We argue the it isespecially important to convey the robot’s intentions toward users in an appropri-ate manner with respect to social norms while taking into account constrainingenvironmental factors (such as noise levels). In part due to their safety-criticalnature, airports in general cause specific challenges with regards to data collec-tion practices.5 AcknowledgementsThis work has partly been supported by the European Commission under con-tract number FP7-ICT-600877 (SPENCER)References1. M. Lohse, N. van Berkel, E. M. A. G. van Dijk, M. P. Joosse, D. E. Karreman, andV. Evers. The influence of approach speed and functional noise on the perceptionof a robot. In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference onIntelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE, 2013.2. R. W. Picard. Affective computing. MIT press, 2000.3. B. Reeves and C. Nass. How people treat computers, television, and new media likereal people and places. CSLI Publications and Cambridge University Press, 1996.4. A. Sardar, M. Joosse, A. Weiss, and V. Evers. Don’t stand so close to me: users’ at-titudinal and behavioral responses to personal space invasion by robots. In Proceed-ings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-RobotInteraction, pages 229–230. ACM, 2012.5. M. L. Walters, M. Lohse, M. Hanheide, B. Wrede, D. S. Syrdal, K. L. Koay, A. Green,H. Hüttenrauch, K. Dautenhahn, G. Sagerer, et al. Evaluating the robot person-ality and verbal behavior of domestic robots using video-based studies. AdvancedRobotics, 25(18):2233–2254, 2011.

Short duration robot interaction at an airport: challenges from a socio-psychological point of view

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