Let me Be your Service Robot: Exploring Early User Experiences of Human-Robot Collaboration for Service Domains

There has been increasing interest in the application of service robots in retail service domains in recent years. In most cases, deployed robot systems focus on serving customer needs autonomously. Specific and individual customer needs often cannot be addressed by these systems, promoting frustration and dissatisfaction in customers. In this study, we investigate the potential of human-robot-collaboration in service domains and how humans may be kept in the loop while customers interact with autonomous service robots. Therefore, we developed a graphical user interface allowing users to control a service robot remotely. We tested the interface with 19 participants to understand their perceptions on the usability of the interface and their user experiences while serving customers in two different use cases. Results illustrate that participants easily learned interacting with the robot and successfully completed the service use cases. They reported diverse user experiences, ranging from feeling odd to having great experiences while remotely operating the robot. We discuss implications of our results for the design of human-robot-interaction in service domains and emphasize a shift of focus from full robot automatization to human-robot collaboration.