We conducted a study of a museum guide robot’s attempt at engaging and disengaging the audience at predetermined points in time during a guided tour. We used “ethnomethodology” as a tool for our study and analysis. In this paper, we describe how we developed, tested, and analyzed a museum guide robot system that borrows cues from social scientists to manage an audience. We have described how we began our study, the previous studies that we referred to, the initial attempts to test our concept, the development of the system, the real-world experiments, and the analysis of the data that we collected. We have described the tools of engagement and disengagement that the robot has used and presented the results of our statistical analysis of the experimental data. Most prominently, we found that a verbal gesture called “summative assessment” and a nonverbal gesture called the “lean-back” gesture are very effective as tools of disengagement. These tools help a robot guide to manage the audience in the same way as a human guide. Moreover, we found that a combination of the aforementioned two gestures is more effective than employing them separately. 1. Introduction Our research seeks to make a contribution to the field of human-robot interaction (HRI). In this field, scientists study the reactions of human participants who engage in a social interaction with robots. Different research teams have studied human-robot interactions in different contexts. Some have chosen the classroom [1] or the school corridors [2], and some have chosen a shopping mall [3], while others have chosen a train station [4] environment and so on. There are a large number of studies conducted in different environments to understand what human users expect from their robot companions or guides. These studies usually target different areas of improvement in machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and robot behavior programming. Such improvements make the robot not only aesthetically more pleasing, approachable, friendly, and easy-to-use, but also a future commercial success. Our lab has been studying human-robot interaction (HRI) in museum environments. Over several years, different researchers in our lab have studied different aspects of interaction and communication in a museum environment and tried to improve visitor approval, enjoyment, and entertainment level. While some have attempted to draw attention by employing a common human communication impairment [5], others have tried to understand the effect of a robot’s physical orientation on its audience [6]. At the core of such
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