Design a robot receptionist

• Main Author: Chin, Ai Di.
• Other Authors: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Robots
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/40814
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The design of the robot receptionist was developed by considering the task assigned to the robot receptionist, and the simplicity of the system the robot receptionist should be. The robot receptionist should ideally greets the customer warmly, attend to the customer’s queries, satisfy the customer, and bid goodbye to the customer. On the chance of meeting the customer a second time, the robot receptionist should be able to greet the customer by his name, to signify friendliness and professionalism. Therefore,the robot receptionist should be able to express its friendly emotions, and make gestures to facilitate the conversation better.Through the experiment held with 11 customers, and 6 receptionists, the expected expressions and gestures of the receptionists were identified with the use of Facial Action Coding Scheme by Paul Ekman, and the Gestures Coding by David McNeil. The study was then evaluated and applied onto the robot receptionist, to come up with adesign of the robot receptionist. The final design of the robot receptionist required only the Eyebrows, Eyes and Mouth the express emotion. It has to be able to make the expression of Happy and Fear, of which, the happy emotion was further categorised into Wide Smile and Little Smile. The smiles helped in giving the customer that the robot receptionist was friendly and professional. Moreover, the gestures the robot receptionist should adopt were Iconic and Deictic. This is mainly due to the fact that these two gestures are more direct and effective for the representation of speech. Only B Spread and G Hand are needed to express the gestures, on both the left and right hands, at the centralised position of the body. In conclusion, this design would help to provide the customer with a better experience with the robot receptionist.