RoboCafé in the Open: Interaction Continuity in Long-Term Public Human-Robot Interaction
Abstract: As robots remain in public spaces over extended periods, they must maintain interaction continuity by preserving and correctly applying context as people, encounters, and circumstances change. To study interaction continuity in long-term public human-robot interactions, we developed RoboCafé, an autonomous conversational coffee robot designed to support repeated interactions through task-aware dialogue, real-time multimodal perception, and memory of prior encounters. We deployed RoboCafé for 12 days in a university building, where it received 148 orders. The deployment involved repeat customers, passersby, changing groups, and back-to-back orders that repeatedly crossed the boundaries assumed by the system's order-centered interaction model. We found that successful interaction continuity requires a robot to determine who is currently present, which prior context belongs to whom, where interactions begin and end, and whether its representation of an interaction matches what is occurring in the physical world. From these observations, we derive four system design requirements for maintaining interaction continuity in longitudinal public human-robot interactions: contextual interaction state, persistent person grounding, explicit interaction life-cycle management, and interaction observability.