Personas and Emotional Design for Public Service Robots: A Case Study with Autonomous Vehicles in Public Transportation

Emerging technologies for future mobility will drastically change the way humans interact with machines and the environment. The common denominator in technologies such as autonomous vehicles (AVs) and artificial intelligence is the absence of the human, which can be addressed with a service robot designed to appeal to human emotion. As service robots tend to operate in environments where there is a diversity of users and thus user requirements, there lies a gap in the definition of how these interactions should be designed. This paper discusses the use of personas in the development of service robots for multi-stakeholder environments through a case study on AVs for public transportation in Singapore.