Advbot: Towards Understanding Human Preference in a Human-Robot Interaction Scenario

Recent studies show that the growth of social robotics market will dominate the robotics sector by 2025. Social robots are set to enter and co-exist in daily living, making human-robot interaction studies a crucial research direction in these robotics applications. One such application is the deployment of robotics in information dissemination to augment the shrinking workforce in developed economies, such as advertisement campaigns. This work seeks to understand whether live robot advertiser can better engage audience and improve audience perception of a marketed product as compared to pre-filmed video advertising clips. In this preliminary study, a humanoid robot, the NAO, was programmed to act according to a marketing campaign script, engaging the audience through voice, simulated eye-contacts, gestures and interaction with the Keepon, a robot to be advertised. We carried out three sets of experiments in the CBD of Singapore on teenage pedestrians. The results of this study suggest that physical robot presence will enhance information dissemination and hence improve advertising result, providing value-add to the advertised product.