Teleoperated Robot Sells Toothbrush in a Shopping Mall: A Field Study

Social robots have been used to provide services in many public spaces. However, many of them are autonomous robots that have poor natural language conversation skills. It is considered a difficult task for an autonomous robot to be a salesperson. In this paper, we propose the use of a teleoperated robot with a human operator for sales purposes. We conducted an exploratory field experiment in which we built a sales booth in a shopping mall and used our teleoperated robot as the salesperson to promote the sales of toothbrushes. We found that our robot has the ability to attract people’s attention and influence their shopping behavior. Furthermore, we discuss the research challenges in designing and applying teleoperated robots to real sales situations.