Shopping with a robotic companion

In this paper, we present a robotic shopping assistant, designed with a cognitive architecture, grounded in machine learning systems, in order to study how the human-robot interaction (HRI) is changing the shopping behavior in smart technological stores. In the software environment of the NAO robot, connected to the Internet with cloud services, we designed a social-like interaction where the robot carries out actions with the customer. In particular, we focused our design on two main skills the robot has to learn: the first is the ability to acquire social input communicated by relevant clues that humans provide about their emotional state (emotions, emotional speech), or collected in the Social Media (such as, information on the customer's tastes, cultural background, etc.). The second is the skill to express in turn its own emotional state, so that it can affect the customer buying decision, refining in the user the sense of interacting with a human-like companion. By combining social robotics and machine learning systems the potential of robotics to assist people in real life situations will increase, providing a gentle customers' acceptance of advanced technologies. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.