Robot behavior designed to encourage conversations between visitors in an exhibition space

In this paper, we propose a novel way to encourage visitors to share their experiences and interests in exhibition spaces. To acquire information about the experiences of the visitors, we used a robot that inhabits the exhibition space. The robot acquires the visitor experience data and then shares this data with other visitors. We believe that this information (i.e., the experiences of previous visitors) will enhance the exhibition experience for subsequent visitors because the information may include interesting topics for the new visitors. However, there are some difficulties in communication between robots and humans. We used “PhotoChat”, which is an in-house photo communication software. PhotoChat is capable of communicating with others by taking photographs and adding annotations to each photograph. It also records the locations for coordination between the photographs and the statistical information contained in the annotations. We therefore used PhotoChat as the communication medium between the robot and the visitors. The robot acquires the visitor experiences and shares these experiences with other visitors through PhotoChat. The robot can also use bodily actions to express instructions to the visitors. We then developed a system that coordinates the photographs and their respective exhibition areas. We also implemented robot behavior (i.e., bodily actions and motions) that includes recommendations for photographs taken by others. We held workshops to perform data collection and manually classified the data into three content categories. We then performed experiments using the developed system to distribute the classified content. The results showed that the robot's behavior encouraged conversations between the visitors based on provided topics.