Personalization in HRI: A longitudinal field experiment

Creating and sustaining rapport between robots and people is critical for successful robotic services. As a first step towards this goal, we explored a personalization strategy with a snack delivery robot. We designed a social robotic snack delivery service, and, for half of the participants, personalized the service based on participants' service usage and interactions with the robot. The service ran for each participant for two months. We evaluated this strategy during a 4-month field experiment. The results show that, as compared with the social service alone, adding personalized service improved rapport, cooperation, and engagement with the robot during service encounters.

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