SanitizerBot: How Human-in-the-Loop Social Robots Can Playfully Support Humans

This paper evaluates a robot that distributed hand-sanitizer over an eight month period (October 2020-June 2021) in public places on the Oregon State University campus. During COVID times, many robots have been deployed in public places as social distancing enforcers, food delivery robots, UV-sanitation robots and more, but few studies have assessed the social situations of these robots. Using the context of robot distributing hand sanitizer, this work explores the benefits that social robots may provide to encouraging healthy human activities, as well as ways in which street-performance inspired approaches and a bit of humor might improve the quality and experience of functional human-robot interactions. After gaining human-in-the-loop deployment experience with a customized interface to enable both planned and improvized responses to human bystanders, we run two sub-studies. In the first, we compare the performance of the robot (moving or still) relative to a traditional hand sanitizer dispenser stick (N=2048, 3 week data collection period). In the second, we evaluate how varied utterance strategies further impact the interaction results (N=185, 2 week data collection period). The robot dramatically outperforms the stick dispenser across all tracked behavioral variables, cuing high levels of positive social engagement. This work finds the utterance design is more complex socially, and offer insights to future robot designers about how to integrate helpful and playful speech into service robot interactions. Finally, across both sub-studies, the work shows that people in groups are more likely to engage with the robot and each other, as well as sanitize their hands.