Welcoming Robot Behaviors for Drawing Attention

Humans use several social cues, both verbal and nonverbal, to draw the attention of others. In this study we investigate whether similar behaviors can also be effectively used by a social robot for drawing attention. To this end, we setup a welcoming humanoid (Pepper) at the entrance of a university building. Its behaviors include one or a combination of behavioral modalities (i.e., a waving gesture, utterance and movement). These behaviors are triggered automatically based on people detection software which tracks passersby and monitors their head keypoints. Our findings imply that Pepper draws more attention when displaying a combination of modalities.