Design, Integration and Test of a Shopping Assistance Robot System M. Garcia-Arroyo Maestría en Inteligencia Artificial Sebastian Camacho No. 5 Xalapa, Ver. Mexico morfeos_ms@hotmail.com L. F. Marin-Urias Departamento en Inteligencia Artificial Sebastian Camacho No. 5 Xalapa, Ver. Mexico luisfelipe.marin@ieee.org A. Marin-Hernandez Departamento en Inteligencia Artificial Sebastian Camacho No. 5 Xalapa, Ver. Mexico anmarin@uv.mx G. de J. Hoyos-Rivera Departamento en Inteligencia Artificial Sebastian Camacho No. 5 Xalapa, Ver. Mexico ghoyos@uv.mx ABSTRACT In this paper is described the current work towards the de- sign of a shopping assistant robot system. This system will allow users to keep control of what they are buying; the robot will help the customer by handling its shopping list, carrying with all the products, and serving as a companion. In this work is also shown the acceptability studies for this kind of robot. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: Human factors; H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Graphical user interfaces General Terms Human factors, Design, Algorithms. Keywords Shopping assistance robot, mobile robots, interfaces, mobile devices, QR codes 1. INTRODUCTION Although supermarkets are well structured, they carry with the issue of having to walk through all the corridors with the goal of not to forget anything. This problem is due to the big quantity of products in increasingly larger spaces, and it is bigger problem with elderly or mobility- impaired users. Even if there are employees for assisting the customers, sometimes they are too busy or they don’t have the appropriate customer service philosophy. The above un- derlines the need to design a system that can facilitate the process of grocery shopping, bringing assistance and com- pany to the customers. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). HRI’12, March 5–8, 2012, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. ACM 978-1-4503-1063-5/12/03. Currently there are some systems that provide assistance to the customers, Shekar et al.[5] can advice users on what products to buy based on nutrition criteria and price con- straints. Items can be added to the shopping list by scanning their barcodes or through the web. In [2] is proposed a sys- tem composed of a main server and a handheld device (PSA) which provides barcode scanning, product information and product comparison. The PSA understands simple com- mands to find products and it can make short sentences to chat with the customer. The robot shown in[4] chat with the customers and guide them to the products they are looking for, using speech and deictic gestures. The robot recognizes the customers using RFID tags, and the conversation is gen- erated by a human operator to avoid voice recognition. Also, in [3] the authors are developing a robot named “TOOMAS” that moves around the store looking for customers who po- tentially need assistance, it approaches to them offering help, the interesting feature of this robot is that the users doesn’t need training on how to use the system because all the activ- ities perform by the users are explained by the robot itself. Finally, Beer et al. [1] conducted a needs assessment among older adults to understand the perceptions of the benefits, concerns, and adoption criteria for mobile remote presence systems. Obtaining 66% of positive opinions, 28% mixed and only 6% of negative opinions. 2. DESIGN & INTEGRATION The main architecture of the system can be observed in fig.1, the system is divided in three sections depending of the setting in which it will be used. The first setting is when the user is at home, an application in the user’s PC will be used to write a shopping list. When the user selects the option “upload list” in his/her mobile device, the app in the PC sends the list to the mobile device where it will be stored. In this way, the user can consult the shopping list at any moment. The second stage of the system begins when the user ar- rives to the supermarket, there he/she can send the list to the computer in the supermarket using the option “send list” Session: LBR Highlights March 5–8, 2012, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 135