User-centered design of professional social service robots

Abstract

Professional services are services provided by businesses. These commercial services strongly differ in their complexity, volume and human interaction. Depending on the service task, robots within service operation have the potential to increase service quality and reduce costs. Additionally, they are indispensable in ageing industrial nations with an increasing shortage of skilled workers. One form of service robots are professional social service robots. They provide employees and customers with interactive situation-specific services like a robot guide or a restaurant service robot. A social service robot not only has technological features needed for services, but also has to have the ability to interact with people. Due to their level of human-robot interaction and needed adaptability, their design is a challenging task, but indispensable for their acceptance by customers and employees. Methodology: As a social service robot a predefined use case of a cloakroom robot was chosen for which a prototypic implementation and its validation through usability testing was conducted. A literature review was the starting point for a concept definition of the robot. Results: The results indicate that users require an intuitive user interface with feedback for each step. Process speed also turned out to be a crucial design requirement, as a slow process speed led to waiting time and user dissatisfaction. It has been shown that the robot itself served as a unique attraction - users preferred the service robot over the common solution of a cloakroom attendant. This work contributes to the understanding of the design requirements of a collaborative service robot, emphasizing the importance of HMI, logical process sequence and process speed to ensure a positive user experience. The findings emphasise the need for user-friendly design of professional social service robots and underline their capability within service operation.

Keywords: professional service automation, service robot, Human-Robot-Interaction, technology acceptance, usability

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005806