Exploring social robot use-cases from a business process perspective

Abstract

In the past 60 years, robots traditionally operated in the production industry, in closed factory environments (Garcia et al., 2007). Technological advancements in recent years facilitated new robot types. One of them called social robot, is primarily built to interact with humans (Siciliano, B., & Khatib, 2016). Pepper is among the first social robots entering the real world, where it faces a dilemma. Companies have high expectation when implementing it, but mostly end up with disappointing use-cases. This master thesis used a case study with a radiology institute to investigate, how beneficial social robot use-cases with Pepper can be found. Hereby it identified either use-case or business process characteristics that favour them. A multi-method qualitative approach, consisting of semi-structured interviews and observations with institutes employees, discovered 18 potential use-cases, and 25 potentially favouring characteristics....