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A Robot that Distributes Flyers to Pedestrians in a Shopping Mall

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International Journal of Social Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper reports our research on developing a robot that distributes flyers to pedestrians. The difficulty is that since the potential receivers are pedestrians who are not necessarily cooperative, the robot needs to appropriately plan its motions, making it easy and non-obstructive for the potential receivers to accept the flyers. We analyzed peoples distributing behavior in a real shopping mall and found that successful distributors approach pedestrians from the front and only extend their arms near the target pedestrian. We also found that pedestrians tend to accept flyers if previous pedestrians took them. Based on these analyses, we developed a behavior model of the robots behavior, implemented it in a humanoid robot, and confirmed its effectiveness in a field experiment.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by JST CREST.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems Innovation, Osaka University, 1-3 Machikaneyama, Toyonaka, Osaka, 560-8531, Japan

    Chao Shi & Hiroshi Ishiguro

  2. Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International IRC/HIL, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihana Science City, Kyoto, 610-0228, Japan

    Satoru Satake, Takayuki Kanda & Hiroshi Ishiguro

Authors
  1. Chao Shi
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  2. Satoru Satake
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  3. Takayuki Kanda
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  4. Hiroshi Ishiguro
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chao Shi.

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The authors declare they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

This work was supported by JST, CREST and was in part presented at a conference [1] at which we only reported our basic model. In this journal paper that is built upon our early work, we further analyzed peoples interactions, identified the importance of continuous handing, and fully implemented our system so that the robot continuously performed handing tasks. We also added a complete field study in a real shopping mall.

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Shi, C., Satake, S., Kanda, T. et al. A Robot that Distributes Flyers to Pedestrians in a Shopping Mall. Int J of Soc Robotics 10, 421–437 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0442-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0442-7

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