Taking candy from a robot: Attitudes toward an autonomous non-humanoid service robot at real-life events

As the presence of social service robots in everyday settings is increasing, it is important to understand how they shape human behaviour in real-world interactions. We aimed to investigate the behavioural differences shown by visitors towards an autonomously operating non-humanoid service robot and a human server performing the same task—offering candies. Additionally, we compared the behavioural responses to the robot with and without candies and evaluated the efficiency of the robot compared to the human server. Our findings confirmed most of our predictions: visitors were more likely to orient at the robot than the human server, but they were not more likely to withdraw from the approaching robot than from the human server. Visitors showed similar frequencies of orienting, giving way, touching, pointing, and waving toward the robot, regardless of whether it was carrying candies. The robot’s tray ran out of candies faster than the human server’s in all nine rounds, indicating a high level of robot efficiency and differences in interaction dynamics shown towards the robot and the human server. Together, these findings demonstrate that service robots may elicit distinctive patterns of attention and engagement in public settings, underscoring their capacity to influence human behaviour without inducing avoidance. The results represent a first step towards a more nuanced understanding of human–robot interaction in service contexts and inform the responsible integration of robots into human environments.