Design Methodology for the UX of HRI: A Field Study of a Commercial Social Robot at an Airport

Research in robotics and human-robot interaction is becoming more and more mature. Additionally, more affordable social robots are being released commercially. Thus, industry is currently demanding ideas for viable commercial applications to situate social robots in public spaces and enhance customers experience. However, present literature in human-robot interaction does not provide a clear set of guidelines and a methodology to (i) identify commercial applications for robotic platforms able to position the users’ needs at the centre of the discussion and (ii) ensure the creation of a positive user experience. With this paper we propose to fill this gap by providing a methodology for the design of robotic applications including these desired features, suitable for integration by researchers, industry, business and government organisations. As we will show in this paper, we successfully employed this methodology for an exploratory field study involving the trial implementation of a commercially available, social humanoid robot at an airport.