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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MuMMER (MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot)

Teaser

Summary

MuMMER (MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot) is a four-year project with the overall goal of developing a humanoid robot (based on Softbank\'s Pepper platform) that can interact autonomously and naturally in the dynamic environments of a public shopping mall, providing an engaging and entertaining experience to the general public. Using co-design methods, we will work together with stakeholders including customers, retailers, and business managers to develop truly engaging robot behaviours. Crucially, our robot will exhibit behaviour that is socially appropriate: combining speech-based interaction with non-verbal communication and human-aware navigation. To support this behaviour, we will develop and integrate new methods from audiovisual scene processing, social-signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation.

Throughout the project, the robot will be deployed in Ideapark, a large public shopping mall in Finland: initially for short visits to aid in collaborative scenario development, co-design, and system evaluation, and later for a long-term field study in the 4th year of the project. Through our co-design approach, we will both study and foster acceptance of consumer robots and thus positively influence the consumer markets of service robots.

The overall objectives of the project include:
1. Developing an interactive robot for entertainment applications.
2. Involving stakeholders throughout the project in a co-design process.
3. Allowing the robot to perceive the world through its own built-in sensors.
4. Automatically learning strategies for the robot to interact with humans.
5. Moving and navigating safely and naturally in a crowded public space.
6. Developing new business models and opportunities for socially interactive robots in public spaces.

The results of MuMMER will take the following forms:

- A co-designed interactive mobile robot with entertainment features and behaviours that is able to interact naturally with humans in a public space.
- A set of concrete, detailed, tested use and business scenarios for a mobile entertainment robot in a shopping mall.
- A set of success criteria and evaluation strategies designed to evaluate the success of the robot in its designated tasks.
- A set of publicly available, reusable, state-of-the-art components for audiovisual scene processing, social signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation.

Work performed

In the first 12 months of the MuMMER project, we have made progress on a number of fronts. The first set of workshops and focus groups have been held with customers, retailers, and management of the Ideapark shopping mall. The results of these workshops have been used to specify an initial target scenario for the robot system, as well as to develop initial versions of the acceptance questionnaire which will be used to track user reactions to the robot throughout the project.

On the technical side, all partners received the Pepper robot in June of 2016 -- since then, all technical partners have developed initial versions of the components which will combine to create the MuMMER system, and these components have been integrated into an initial interactive system that supports the target scenario identified from the co-design process. In addition, the hardware of the Pepper robot has been evaluated in the context of the needs of the project, and a concrete plan has been developed together with SoftBank Robotics Europe for the hardware and software updates which will be made to Pepper to allow it to fully support the research goals of MuMMER.

Final results

In the first year of the project, we have developed a modular architecture to allow state-of-the-art software components to work together to support socially intelligent interaction with the MuMMER robot, and have also integrated initial versions of all components into the architecture. These components address tasks such as audiovisual processing, social signal processing, interaction management and action selection, and interactive navigation and motion planning -- all of which are necessary to support the overall task of socially intelligent and engaging interaction with a robot in a public space. With these advanced software components operating together on the Pepper robot, the most widely available current social robot platform, the potential impact is large: a robot that is able to support this sort of socially intelligent interaction can be deployed in a wide variety of public contexts.

In addition, as part of the co-design process together with stakeholders, we have also begun developing a set of metrics to evaluate the success of a socially interactive public-space robot. As such robots are more widely deployed, these metrics will play a crucial role in assessing the performance of the robots in various contexts.