Designing a Contactless Office-Assistant Robot Using User Differentiation

ABSTRACT

As the demand for social distancing increases due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it becomes hard to have close interaction between people in an office. Thus, this research aims to develop a contactless office assistant robot that offers interactive services using user differentiation. Our robot system utilizes various functions such as image recognition, user tracking, voice recognition, voice utterance, and secondary image output to enable natural interaction with human and configures a task manager to operate the functions as one integrated system at the required timing. For system evaluation, a video survey was conducted on the appearance of the robot, the robot’s functions, and the demonstration service scenario in which our robot plays an automated assistive service to people in a department office located on the university campus. As a result 92% (62 people) of the survey participants evaluated the robot positively. And 57% (40 people) of the survey participants rated this system as effective in preventing infectious diseases. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.