Welcome to the library: Integrating social robots in Indian libraries

Lokhesh, N. N., Swaminathan, K., Shravan, G., Menon, D., Mishra, S., Nandanwar, A., & Mishra, C. (2025). Welcome to the library: Integrating social robots in Indian libraries. In O. Palinko, L. Bodenhagen, J.-J. Cabibihan, K. Fischer, S. Šabanović, K. Winkle, L. Behera, S. S. Ge, D. Chrysostomou, W. Jiang, & H. He (Eds.), Social Robotics: 16th International Conference, ICSR + AI 2024, Odense, Denmark, October 23–26, 2024, Proceedings (pp. 239-246). Singapore: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-981-96-3525-2_20.
Libraries are very often considered the hallway to developing knowledge. However, the lack of adequate staff within Indian libraries makes catering to the visitors’ needs difficult. Previous systems that have sought to address libraries’ needs through automation have mostly been limited to storage and fetching aspects while lacking in their interaction aspect. We propose to address this issue by incorporating social robots within Indian libraries that can communicate and address the visitors’ queries in a multi-modal fashion attempting to make the experience more natural and appealing while helping reduce the burden on the librarians. In this paper, we propose and deploy a Furhat robot as a robot librarian by programming it on certain core librarian functionalities. We evaluate our system with a physical robot librarian (N = 26). The results show that the robot librarian was found to be very informative and overall left with a positive impression and preference.
Publication type
Proceedings paper
Publication date
2025

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