Hi. My name is Sichao Song, I am a researcher from CyberAgent Inc. and a visiting researcher
from Osaka university. I will present our paper titled Costume vs. Wizard of Oz vs. Telepresence:
How Social Presence Forms of Tele-operated Robots Influence Customer Behavior.
In this paper, we explore the effective form of
social presence for a tele-operated robot to provide customer service.
We launched a tele-operated robot in a supermarket and had it deliver recipe flyers. We determined
that the customers behaved significantly different when they faced the tele-operated
robot in different forms. Our robot that exhibited a moderate presence of the operator,
which is called the costume form, achieved the overall best performance.
In recent years, tele-operated robots have been increasingly deployed in
public places to provide customer service. Differing from telepresence robots that
replicate a person’s presence from his or her location to a remote location,
tele-operated robots usually do not deliberately indicate the presence of the operators.
Earlier studies explored the differences between an autonomous robot and a tele-operated robot
and found that the users could treat a robot differently, depending on whether they recognize
the robot as an autonomous system or a human. However, whether a tele-operated robot should
inform its users of the existence of the human operator or not has yet not been well explored.
Some studies found that people felt less embarrassed when talking to an autonomous robot,
therefore a tele-operated robot may be able to offer a more relaxed interaction experience
if it hides the presence of its operator. Other research suggested that a tele-operated robot
may be more persuasive and achieve a higher task performance if the robot informs the user that it
is tele-operated. Therefore, in this paper we explored the research questions that whether,
and in what form a tele-operated robot should indicate the operator’s presence,
and how it would affect the customers’ perception toward the robot and their behaviors.
Our tele-operated system comprises two main parts: an operator interface and a robot controller.
Basically, the operator interface allows an operator to remotely control and talk to the robot
via a video call web application. It is embedded with a voice recognition module,
which enables the interface to recognize the operator’s speech
and send the results to the robot controller. The operator can also alter the gaze direction
of the robot by clicking on the target directions in the video.
We conducted the experiment at the entrance of a supermarket in Osaka,
Japan. Because there is a main pathway across the entrance of the supermarket,
the robot attracted a significant amount of the customers’ attention. Whether a person
had a plan to visit the supermarket or not, they had a good chance of noticing the robot.
One of the basic task of the robot was to welcome customers and offer help if needed. The main task
for the tele-operated robot was to deliver the supermarket’s recipe flyers to the customers.
Flyer delivery task has been utilized for human–robot interaction research as it is
believed to be a future task for robots in daily environments The recipe flyers were placed beside
the robot, and could be easily picked up by the customers. A display behind the recipe
flyers also illustrated the promotion image of the recipe to attract the attention of the customers.
We decided three forms of social presence as the experimental conditions: Wizard of Oz, Costume,
and Telepresence. To be specific, we adjusted the amount of the robot’s social presence by
two factors: face photo of the operator and voice conversion. To protect the personal information of
the operators who participated in the experiment, we utilized AI- generated fake face photo instead.
We prepared face photos for both male and female versions, one for each. Regarding
voice conversion, we utilized the MorphVOX Pro as it was capable of high quality real-time voice
conversion, and also offered sufficient number of parameters to adjust the conversion effect.
With these two factors, we were able to create the different forms of social presence for our
tele-operated robot. We expected that Wizard of Oz exerted the least amount of social presence
and pressure as it acted as an autonomous system, Costume displayed a moderate amount
of social presence, and Telepresence exerted the strongest social presence and pressure.
The face photos were prepared and put above the control box, and in front of the body of the robot
while avoiding hindering the robot’s movements. Voice conversion software was installed on the
operator’s laptop. It could easily be turned on or off, in accordance with the experimental
condition. The operators in Wizard of Oz and Costume were asked to speak like a child-like
robot whereas the operators in Telepresence were asked to speak normally. The experiment was
performed on four days, including two weekdays and two weekends. The three experimental conditions
were counterbalanced and assigned to the four days, resulting in 12 experimental sections.
Each section lasted for 3 hours, and was assigned with a different participant as the operator.
We employed in total 12 participants, 6 males and 6 females, as the operators.
All of the participants were native Japanese in their 20s or 30s.
Their sex and age were counterbalanced for the experimental sections.
A main difference among the three forms in task performance was observed that:
Costume had the highest stop rate and particularly higher compared to Wizard of Oz;
Costume and Wizard of Oz had significantly higher conversation rate compared to Telepresence;
and Costume and Telepresence had significantly higher recipe flyer pick-up rate compared to
Wizard of Oz. In general, the Costume form achieved an overall highest task performance.
In addition, although no statistic analysis was performed, operators in the Costume
condition seemed to have overall higher workloads compared to both Wizard of Oz and Telepresence.
Our findings suggested that the customers behaved significantly different
when the robot displayed the three forms of social presence. We compiled both the
strength and weakness with regards to the three forms of social presence in the table.
Accordingly, we offer the following recommendations for applying tele-operated
robots in accordance to the applications that: Consider Wizard of Oz if you aim at providing a
pleasurable and interactive experience, and do not have particular goals regarding task performance;
consider Costume if you wish to provide a pleasurable service experience
while having task performance goals achieved; and consider Telepresence if you need to
clarify the existence of the operator and aim at achieving task performance goals.
Thank you very much for your listening.
For the details please check out our papers if you are interested.