Personal service: a robot that greets people individually based on observed behavior patterns

Abstract

Abstract — We are developing an interactive service robot which provides personal greetings to customers, using a machine-learning approach based on observations of a customer’s appearance or behavior from on-board or environmental sensors. For each visit, several features are recorded, such as “time of day ” or “number of people in group. ” A set of classifiers trained by human coders compare the current features with the person’s individual history, to determine an appropriate feature for a robot to speak about. This system enables the robot to make context-appropriate comments such as “good morning, you're here very early today. ” We present the design of our system and an encouraging set of preliminary prediction results based on one month of data taken from real customers at a shopping mall. Index Terms—Human-robot interaction, long-term interaction