Hello Pepper, May I Tickle You?

Abstract

We took a social robot Pepper to a shopping mall for one day to see what kind of initial responses it draws from people. We observed that the robot was quickly surrounded by children when there were others-especially adults-interacting with it. The children seemed to especially enjoy the activity-related applications, such as tickling the robot or giving a high-five. Adults were interested in hearing about useful applications and tended to talk to the robot as if it were any machine capable of speech recognition. These observations will help to design more interactive and entertaining applications for shopping mall robots.