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What Is It?
A social robot is described as a robot who communicates and interacts with its users, understands and relates to its users in a personal way. Social robots have been widely deployed in various domain areas, such as health care, education, museum and cultural institutions, biomechanics and neuroscience, to perform varied tasks (Nguyen, 2020; Tyagi, 2021). With rapid progress in the areas of attention, facial expressions, emotion recognition, voice recognition, social robots are now capable to interact and engage with human at a higher level as a service or information disseminating agents (Savela et al., 2017).
Humanoid social robots are robots resembling of a human, perform human-centric functions, such as providing directions and customer assistance. In libraries, humanoid robots interact with patrons and provide concierge service, greetings, wayfinding, assistance, and education. The applications of humanoid robots in libraries continue to grow.
For example, Pepper and NAO are two common commercial social humanoids manufactured by Softbank Robotics. Pepper can “recognize faces and basic human emotions” and is able to engage with people through conversation” in 15 languages (Softbank, 2022b). While NAO, smaller in size than Pepper, is a bipedal robot that interact with people through their seven touch sensors, four directional microphones and speakers, two 2D cameras, and speech recognition and dialogue in 20 languages (Softbank, 2022a). Using a proprietary software, Pepper can search library catalog, reads out search results and item availability, and send results to patron’s mobile devices (Rieger, 2021).
NAO and Pepper have been used adopted by several public libraries in Japan since 2015. It interacts with patrons through conversation and the touch screen on its chest. They provide guidance, answer FAQs, perform library catalog search, make reservation, and offer other assistances to patrons (Harada, 2019). At the Konan University in Japan, Koro, a guidance robot, greets patrons at the entrance of the library and display library floor plan and other guidance (Harada, 2019).
Use Case - Central Rappahannock Regional library, Virginia
NAO and Pepper have also joined the library workforce in libraries in other countries. For instance, at the Central Rappahannock Regional library, Fredericksburg, VA, Pepper greets, dances, plays games, and takes selfies with patrons[1]. It provides description, review, and cover image of books. The library collaborates with RobotLAB, a software developer, to create content and applications for Pepper. Eventually, Pepper will be part of the library’s digital media lab, a makerspace, for patrons to learn more about AI and coding, as well as develop robotic applications (Jett, 2019; Jones, 2018). At the Hannover City Library in Germany, Pepper assists patron search library resources, and answer questions (CleverGuides, 2020). At the ZHB Lucerne University Library in Switzerland, Luzi, a Pepper robot, is trained to answer questions about the library (ZBW Mediatalk, 2022).
Use Case - NAO at Noosa Library in Australia
In Australia, libraries have been implementing humanoid robots in the last few years. Noosa Library was the first Australian public library to adopt NAO robot to facilitate its STEM program in 2016. Other Australian libraries further use robots for a range of programs and services, including storytelling, library tours, computer programming, and robotics skills (Nguyen, 2019). After in-depth interviews of ten public librarians who led the robotic program at their library as well as observations of five humanoid robot events, Nguyen (2020) identified four themes imposed by robot on Australian public libraries. First, as a community builder robots appeal to, entertain, connect, and empower people. Second, as a teacher robots educate, stimulate, and motivate library patrons to learn emerging technologies. Third, as an aid robots perform and assist librarians on various tasks. Finally, robots can create challenges for libraries. Without adequate expertise, resources, and commitment, a robotic program might not be sustainable. In conclusion, Nguyen (2020) recommends public libraries to include robotic program in its strategic plan and collaborate with key stakeholders, including universities and robotics center, as well as vendors. Furthermore, libraries should communicate effectively with its administration and community about the evolving and perpetual beta nature of robotic pilot project.
Left: NAO at Noosa Library
Use Case - Bibli at Longmont Public Library, Colorado
The Longmont Public Library in Colorado partnered with Robauto, a startup company, and created Bibli to interact children with autism (Jones, 2015). The Guelph Public Library in Canada also introduced Beepbot, an iPAL robot, to help children learn life skills, including socialization, reading, spelling, math, and coding (Carty, 2019). In all these cases, librarians stress of making STEAM technology in general and AI especially accessible to community members to support a more inclusive and diverse environment.
Use Case - Human Robot Interaction
At Hanoi University of Science and Technology in Vietnam, researchers developed a service robot that interacts with patrons through a hand gesture recognition system in a library environment (Nguyen et al., 2015). The robot is trained to perform tasks, such as looking up a book, reading a book summary, and renewing overdue items, based on seven types of hand gesture. The robot obtained a satisfactory performance in the experiments.
Use Case - First Impression
However, human-robot interactions in public spaces still face challenges. In an exploratory study of the interaction between university students and Pepper humanoid robot in the library of an Australian university, researchers found that more than half of the students interviewed felt Pepper was creepy and scary. The authors speculate that such unfavorable reaction may come from the negative image of robotic technology depicted in science fictions and popular media (Mubin et al., 2020).
Right: Students interacting with Pepper at an Australian university (Mubin et al., 2020)
Use Case - LUCAS at Limerick University
Several researchers have developed protypes of service robots for their experimental projects. At the Limerick University in Australia, Behan & O’Keeffe (2005, 2006) built a mobile robotic assistant, LUCAS, to improve the quality of life of elderly. Specifically, LUCAS is a library service robot to assist and socially engage with individuals in the library. Using its computer vision, localization, navigation, and path-planning algorithm, LUCAS can interact with patrons, determine the shelf-location of a specific book, develop the travel path, and lead patrons to the bookshelf where item is situated. The test results show that the robot navigated accurately within the testing environment. All seven human testers in this experiment thought the robot was a success and would use it again (Behan & O’Keeffe, 2008).
Left: LUCAS developed at Limerick University
Use Case - Service Robots for Children
Several libraries and researchers developed service robots specifically for children who are likely with limited understanding and cognitive abilities of library classification system, catalog, as well as space. In Taiwan, a group of experts from the areas of robotics, ergonomics, and information design partnered with librarians in designing a service robot, Book Smile, to work with children. Through an iterative process that includes needs assessment, survey, formative assessment, prototyping, and refinement, Book Smile features recommending a book; locating, identifying, and obtaining the book on the shelf; and checking out the book to patrons. The testing suggests the robot was effective as a humanoid for motivating and guiding children in using library (Lin et al., 2014). In Japan, a public library employed a library guidance robot, called Uta-San, to guide elementary school students to bookshelves for books to read (Harada, 2019).
Left: Book Smile robot in Taiwan
Sato haif104.mp4Use Case - Book Recommendation Robot, University of Tsukuba
Another educational use of robot is to cultivate student’s interest in reading through book recommendations, book club discussion, and storytelling. At the University of Tsukuba, researchers designed a book recommendation robot that allows children to contribute the contents and customize robot’s speech, appearance, movements, and facial expression associated with the book they recommend (Kudo et al., 2016). The test results show that the system is easy for elementary school students to add contents and there were interested in the books recommended by the robot (Sato et al., 2017).
Left: Book Recommendation Robot developed at Tsukuba University:
Use Case - Storytelling with NAO
In Taiwan, researchers configured a NAO humanoid robot from Softbank Robotics to assist in storytelling sessions. NAO is programmed to react to audio recording with body movement and expressions. The results showed that children responded positively to robot’s presentation in storytelling sessions. They were further motivated to read story books after attending the session (Shen and Lin, 2018). The Yukuhashi Public Library in Japan also experimented with a NAO humanoid robot to facilitate a book club discussion (Harada, 2019).
Use Case - Palo Alto City Library
Winner of the Urban Libraries Council's 2019 Innovation Award, the Library is the leader in offering robotic programs since 2016. Using NAO humanoid robot and Robo Dojo toolkit, the program offers robot coding workshops, robot storytelling session, robot show, and a community-built Farmbot.
Left Top: Discover and learn coding, robotics and computational thinking at Palo Alto City Library
Left Bottom: Robotic program at Palo Alto City Library
References
Behan, J., & O’Keeffe, D. (2005). LUCAS: The Library Assistant Robot, Implementation and Localisation. International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control and Automation and International Conference on Intelligent Agents, Web Technologies and Internet Commerce (CIMCA-IAWTIC’06), 1, 1140–1146. https://doi.org/10.1109/CIMCA.2005.1631416
Behan, J. & O’Keeffe, D. T. (2006). The development of an intelligent library assistant robot. In Proceedings of the 24th IASTED International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Applications, AIA 2006, 474–479. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1166890.1166971
Behan, J. & O’Keeffe, D. T. (2008). The development of an autonomous service robot. Implementation: “Lucas”—The library assistant robot. Intelligent Service Robotics, 1(1), 73–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-007-0005-0
Carty, M. (March 22, 2019). Meet ‘Beepbot’: The Guelph Public Library’s new robot. https://globalnews.ca/news/5084963/guelph-library-robot/
CleverGuides. (2020 October 25). The City Library of Hannover uses the humanoid robot Pepper … https://twitter.com/CleverGuides/status/1320332584841248769
Jett, C. (2019 November 3). Central Rappahannock Regional Library’s newest recruit is a robot. Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News.
Jones, I. (2018 August 30). Pepper the humanoid robot comes to Roanoke County Public Library. WSLS.com. https://www.wsls.com/news/2018/08/30/pepper-the-humanoid-robot-comes-to-roanoke-county-public-library/
Harada, T. (2019). Robotics and artificial intelligence technology in Japanese libraries. IFLA WLIC, 2019. http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2695/1/s08-2019-harada-en.pdf
Kudo, Y., Kayano, W., Sato, T., & Osawa, H. (2016). User generated agent: Designable book recommendation robot programmed by children. HAI 2016 - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction, 67–70. https://doi.org/10.1145/2974804.2980489
Lin, W., Yueh, H., Wu, H., & Fu, L. (2014). Developing a service robot for a children’s library: A design-based research approach. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(2), 290–301. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.22975
Mubin, O., Kharub, I., & Khan, A. (2020). Pepper in the Library" Students’ First Impressions. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382979
Nguyen, L. (2019). An investigation of humanoid robots and their implications for Australian public libraries: research report. Australian Library and Information Association, Canberra, A.C.T. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/131451/
Nguyen, L. C. (2020). The impact of humanoid robots on Australian public libraries. Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association, 69(2), 130–148. https://doi.org/10.1080/24750158.2020.1729515
Nguyen, V., Tran, T., Le, T., Mullot, R., & Courboulay, V. (2015). Using hand postures for interacting with assistant robot in library. 2015 Seventh International Conference on Knowledge and Systems Engineering (KSE), 354–359. https://doi.org/10.1109/KSE.2015.18
Rieger, N. (2021 March 25). Pepper brings a breath of fresh air to libraries. Robotics Blog. https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/blog/news-trends/pepper-brings-breath-fresh-air-libraries
Sato, T., Kudo, Y., & Osawa, H. (2017). Book introduction robot designed by children for promoting interest in reading. HAI 2017 - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction, 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3125739.3125740
Savela, N., Turja, T., & Oksanen, A. (2017). Social Acceptance of Robots in Different Occupational Fields: A Systematic Literature Review. International Journal of Social Robotics, 10(4), 493–502. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-017-0452-5
Shen, W. & Lin, J. (2018). Robot Assisted Reading: A Preliminary Study on the Robotic Storytelling Service to Children in the Library. In Innovative Technologies and Learning (Vol. 11003, pp. 528–535). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99737-7_56
Softbank. (2022a). NAO the humanoid and programmable robot. https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/nao
Softbank. (2022b). Pepper the humanoid and programmable robot. https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/pepper
Tyagi, R. (2021 May 31). The landscape of AI & robotic guides in museums & cultural places. Softbank. https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/blog/news-trends/landscape-ai-robotic-guides-museums-cultural-places
ZBW Mediatalk. (2022 May 18). Best practice at the ZHB Lucerne: Agile working in the context of small and large libraries. ZBW Mediatalk. https://www.zbw-mediatalk.eu/2022/03/agile-working-in-the-context-of-small-and-large-libraries/
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