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Visiting Cultural Heritage with a Tour Guide Robot: A User Evaluation Study in-the-Wild

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9388))

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Abstract

In this paper we present a user evaluation study on location at the Royal Alcázar in Seville, Spain, with the fully autonomous tour guide robot FROG. In this robot, technological innovations in navigation and vision were integrated with state-of-the-art design for robot behavior in order to provide interactive tours and adaptive content to visitors. In our user evaluation study we aimed to gain insights in user experiences of and attitudes and responses towards this fully autonomous social robot. Such studies are important, because they provide information about how people interact with social robots outside a controlled setting. Invited as well as spontaneous visitors followed tours guided by FROG and were interviewed about their opinions and experiences. Our findings indicate that even if isolated technical features work perfectly in controlled settings, they might not work well in the integrated system, because naïve people interact with the system in an unforeseen manner.

The research leading to these results received funding from the EC’s 7th Framework program under Grant agreement 288235. http://www.frogrobot.eu. We thank the entire EU FP7 FROG-team for technically enabling these user experience tours.

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Correspondence to Daphne Karreman .

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Karreman, D., Ludden, G., Evers, V. (2015). Visiting Cultural Heritage with a Tour Guide Robot: A User Evaluation Study in-the-Wild. In: Tapus, A., André, E., Martin, JC., Ferland, F., Ammi, M. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9388. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_32

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