Saya Nikaido
2025
Exploring Factors Influencing Hospitality in Mobile Robot Guidance: A Wizard-of-Oz Study with a Teleoperated Humanoid Robot
Ao Guo
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Shota Mochizuki
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Sanae Yamashita
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Saya Nikaido
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Tomoko Isomura
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Ryuichiro Higashinaka
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Developing mobile robots that can provide guidance with high hospitality remains challenging, as it requires the coordination of spoken interaction, physical navigation, and user engagement. To gain insights that contribute to the development of such robots, we conducted a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) study using Teleco, a teleoperated humanoid robot, to explore the factors influencing hospitality in mobile robot guidance. Specifically, we enrolled 30 participants as visitors and two trained operators, who teleoperated the Teleco robot to provide mobile guidance to the participants. A total of 120 dialogue sessions were collected, along with evaluations from both the participants and the operators regarding the hospitality of each interaction. To identify the factors that influence hospitality in mobile guidance, we analyzed the collected dialogues from two perspectives: linguistic usage and multimodal robot behaviors. We first clustered system utterances and analyzed the frequency of categories in high- and low-satisfaction dialogues. The results showed that short responses appeared more frequently in high-satisfaction dialogues. Moreover, we observed a general increase in participant satisfaction over successive sessions, along with shifts in linguistic usage, suggesting a mutual adaptation effect between operators and participants. We also conducted a time-series analysis of multimodal robot behaviors to explore behavioral patterns potentially linked to hospitable interactions.