A Study on Customer’s Perception of Robot Nonverbal Communication Skills in a Service Environment

Nonverbal communication has the potential to enable robots to interact with customers in service environments efficiently. While previous efforts in this domain have been paid to the understanding of customers’ interaction experience from different aspects, there is a lack of studies on the configuration of multimodal interaction (i.e., the combination of nonverbal gestures, voice, and touch) in service environments and the effect of nonverbal communication styles when performed in this setting. This paper aims to address the gap in the literature by introducing a multimodal HRI framework operated in a cafe shop setting. A systematic study is conducted with 171 customers. It is followed by an in-depth analysis based on objective and subjective measurements to build an understanding of customers’ attitudes towards the robot’s nonverbal behaviours.