Enhancing the robot service experience through social media

The development of effective robot servers has been an intensely studied research area for many years. Their operation in a dynamic environment presents multiple challenges in navigation, recognition, human-robot interaction, and manipulation. This paper addresses the challenges presented by recognition and human-robot interaction by utilizing Twitter and Facebook to potentially mitigate some of the long known issues in these areas. Specifically, we will address the problems of reliable human-robot communications and efficiency of service delivery. An online scenario study is administered to participants to evaluate the performance of a social media enabled robot as compared to a traditional speech synthesis and recognition enabled robot. The potential for the robot to learn and build long-term relationships through access to these social mediums is also discussed as a future work.