Contextual analysis of human non-verbal guide behaviors to inform the development of FROG, the Fun Robotic Outdoor Guide

This paper reports the first step in a series of studies to design the interaction behaviors of an outdoor robotic guide. We describe and report the use case development carried out to identify effective human tour guide behaviors. In this paper we focus on non-verbal communication cues in gaze, gestures and movements. The work reported involves the observation of human tour guide behaviors and visitor responses as well as interviews with guides. An affinity diagram is used to identify effective communication cues of human guides and the relations between them. The opportunities for a robotic guide are discussed. We argue that human guide behaviors and strategies cannot be one-on-one applied to robot tour guides. Instead, we aim to develop abstractions of the human behaviors, appropriate for robot tour guides and effective in realizing visitor engagement. The results of this study will be used to create a first Fun Robotic Outdoor Guide prototype with the abstracted interactive robot guide behaviors implemented to assess the effects on visitor experience in ‘the wild.’