Personal service: A robot that greets people individually based on observed behavior patterns

We are developing an interactive service robot which provides personal greetings to customers, using a machine-learning approach based on observations of a customer´s appearance or behavior from on-board or environmental sensors. For each visit, several features are recorded, such as “time of day” or “number of people in group.” A set of classifiers trained by human coders compare the current features with the person´s individual history, to determine an appropriate feature for a robot to speak about. This system enables the robot to make context-appropriate comments such as “good morning, you´re here very early today.” We present the design of our system and an encouraging set of preliminary prediction results based on one month of data taken from real customers at a shopping mall.