Investigation on Accepted Package Delivery Location: A User Study-based Approach

The delivery of packages using robots is emerging and getting common day-to-day. However, currently robots can only deliver packages either far away from the home or at a random location in front of the door. This is because there is no consensus on where to deliver the package around the house that will be liked by the recipient. Therefore, with the ultimate goal of the development of intelligent delivery robots in the future, we conducted a user study where the participants were asked to place packages around a house in a simulated environment through virtual reality at a location of their choice. The participants were asked to deliver packages in six different scenarios that were created based on the common setups seen in the real world. The findings indicated that the participants either prefer the package to be easily visible right in front of the door or at a partially hidden location that is secure and avoids theft. The preferences of the participants were also seen that they depend on other factors like the objects present in the delivery site and the neighborhood. We expect that these findings can open the door to further research on delivery robots in their perception and cognition abilities to deliver packages to desired locations by human recipients.