Real-World Evaluation of a University Guidance and Information Robot

Andrew Blair, Mary Ellen Foster

Abstract: We have developed a social robot to assist an existing support team in a large, recently-built university building designed for learning and teaching. Over the course of a week-long, supervised deployment, we collected long form questionnaire results (N = 59) on attitudes and feelings towards the robot from students and staff. We observed an overall positive response to the robot, but with a wide variety of specific opinions. We describe the limitations and challenges we found with the real-world deployment and outline next steps to allow an unsupervised deployment of the robot as part of the university’s wider service delivery strategy.