Robots in autonomous buses: Who hosts when no human is there?

Abstract

In mid-2023, we performed an experiment in autonomous buses in Stockholm, Sweden, to evaluate the role that social robots might have in such settings, and their effects on passengers' feeling of safety and security, given the absence of human drivers or clerks. To address the situations that may occur in autonomous public transit (APT), we compared an embodied agent to a disembodied agent. In this video publication, we showcase some of the things that worked with the interactions we created, and some problematic issues that we had not anticipated.