Hospital Receptionist Robot v2: Design for Enhancing Verbal Interaction with Social Skills

Ho Seok Ahn, Wesley Yep, Jong Yoon Lim, Byeong-Kyu Ahn, Deborah L. Johanson, Eui Jun Hwang, Min Ho Lee, Elizabeth Broadbent, Bruce A. MacDonald

Abstract: This paper presents a new version of robot receptionist system for healthcare facility environment. Our HealthBots consists of three subsystems: a receptionist robot system, a nurse assistant robot system, and a medical server. Our first version of receptionist robot, interacts with human at hospital reception, gives instructions to human verbally, but cannot understand what human says, so it uses a touch screen to get the response from human. In this paper, we design a receptionist robot that recognizes human face as well as speech, which enhances verbal interaction skill of robot. In addition, we design a reaction generation engine to generate appropriate reactive motions and speech. Moreover, we study which social skills are important to a hospital receptionist robot to enhance social interaction, such as friendliness and attention. We implemented perception modules, decision-making modules, and reaction modules to our HealthBots architecture, and did two case studies to find essential social skills for hospital receptionist robots.