SciRoc paper accepted for presentation at the the IEEE-Roman 2019 conference

As part of the SciRoc project, a team of researchers from La Sapienza University in Rome (Lun Wang, Luca Iocchi, Andrea Marrella and Daniele Nardi) has developed a dedicated questionnaire to investigate customers’ perceptions with respect to Episode 4 from the upcoming SciRoc challenge, which will take place in Milton Keynes on September 16-22, 2019.

This episode will see robots interact with customers of the shopping mall while taking the elevator, and is thus inherently focused on Human Robot Interaction (HRI).  As part of the design of this episode, the team has first interviewed experts in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) to understand which robot behaviours were most likely affect the users’ perceptions in the considered scenario. Second, users have been interviewed as well, to select a subset of target robot behaviours identified as relevant, from the users’ perspective.

The approach described by Lun Wang and colleagues, was tested on two real robots, Pepper and MARRtino (in the Picture), and allowed to derive a final list of 17 behaviours to  include in the final design of the questionnaire, consisting of a set of items evaluated on a 5-point Likert-scale.

The results of this survey are reported in the paper titled “Developing a Questionnaire to Evaluate Customers’ Perception in the Smart City Robotic Challenge”. The paper has been accepted for presentation at the 28th Edition of the IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Ro-Man 2019), which will be held on Oct 14-18, 2019, in New Delhi (India).

The questionnaire will aid collecting useful data on customers’ perceptions from their interaction with all robots participating to Episode 4.