Developing a socially-aware robot assistant for delivery tasks

This paper discusses about elements to be considered for developing a Service Robot that performs its task in a social environment. Due to the social focus of the service, not only technical considerations are demanded in order to accomplish with the task, but also the acceptance of use for the people, who interact with all of them. As our particular research topic, we establish a taxonomy to determine the framework for the development of socially-aware robot assistants for serving tasks such as deliveries. This is a general approach to be considered for any service robot being implemented in a social context. This article presents several previous cases of the implementation of service mobile robots, their analysis and the motivation of how to solve their acceptance and use by people. Therefore, under this approach it is very important not to generate false expectations about the capabilities of the robot, because as it is explained in the state of the art analysis that very high unsatisfied expectations lead to leaving the robot unused....