Design and Evaluation of Service Robot's Proactivity in Decision-Making Support Process

As service robots are envisioned to provide decision-making support (DMS) in public places, it is becoming essential to design the robot's manner of offering assistance. For example, robot shop assistants that proactively or reactively give product recommendations may impact customers' shopping experience. In this paper, we propose an anticipation-autonomy policy framework that models three levels of proactivity (high, medium and low) of service robots in DMS contexts. We conduct a within-subject experiment with 36 participants to evaluate the effects of DMS robot's proactivity on user perceptions and interaction behaviors. Results show that a highly proactive robot is deemed inappropriate though people can get rich information from it. A robot with medium proactivity helps reduce the decision space while maintaining users' sense of engagement. The least proactive robot grants users more control but may not realize its full capability. We conclude the paper with design considerations for service robot's manner.