About the MuMMER project

Pepper robot (Wikimedia Commons)MuMMER (MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot) was a four-year, EU-funded project, where we developed a humanoid robot (based on Softbank's Pepper platform) able to interact autonomously and naturally in the dynamic environments of a public shopping mall, providing an engaging and entertaining experience to the general public. Using co-design methods, we worked together with stakeholders including customers, retailers, and business managers to develop truly engaging robot behaviours. Crucially, our robot exhibited behaviour that is socially appropriate: combining speech-based interaction with non-verbal communication and human-aware navigation. To support this behaviour, we will develop and integrate new methods from audiovisual scene processing, social-signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation. 

Ideapark -- image from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)Throughout the project, the robot was deployed in Ideapark, a large public shopping mall in Finland: initially for short visits to aid in collaborative scenario development, co-design, and system evaluation, and later for a long-term field study in the 4th year of the project. Through our co-design approach, we will both study and foster acceptance of consumer robots and thus positively influence the consumer markets of service robots.

The results of MuMMER take the following forms:

  • A co-designed interactive mobile robot with entertainment features and behaviours that is able to interact naturally with humans in a public space.
  • A set of concrete, detailed, tested use and business scenarios for a mobile entertainment robot in a shopping mall.
  • A set of success criteria and evaluation strategies designed to evaluate the success of the robot in its designated tasks.
  • A set of publicly available, reusable, state-of-the-art components for audiovisual scene processing, social signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation.

The MuMMER project began in March 2016 and had a duration of 48 months, and was funded by the European Commission through its Horizon 2020 Programme.