Alex Anderson-Ross

SUSTAIN Cohort 1 Student

University

University of Lincoln

SUSTAIN Project

Service Robots Interventions Promoting More Sustainable Buyers’ Choices in Supermarkets

Supervisors

Dr Francesco Del Duchetto (University of Lincoln)
Dr David McBey (University of Aberdeen)

Dr Leonardo Guevara (University of Lincoln)

Research Interests

Human Robot Interaction and Robotics

After finishing my masters in mathematics I joined the CDT because it offered me the opportunity to pivot from my mathematics background and into a relevant field which allowed me to continue my studies while having the potential to help others. My favourite thing about the CDT is the opportunity to travel and connect with others in the same position with its partnerships all across the UK. My long-term goal is to be able to apply the most recent technological developments into people's lives while also trying to minimise the effects of climate change and help make a greener world. Agri-food robotics is developing field which has many areas of interest, in particular I am interested in the interaction between humans and robots in an attempt to promote a more sustainable lifestyle and help educate people in the areas of sustainability that are harder to understand.

I am going to be studying my PhD at the University of Lincoln. My favourite thing about Lincoln is the variety of food places that can be found here, there is much more choice of food to eat here than back at home so I like to try everything at least once and enjoy a food palette from all over the world.
In my spare time I enjoy reading books and learning languages when alone and with friends I enjoy playing golf and various other games.

Service Robots Interventions Promoting More Sustainable Buyers’ Choices in Supermarkets

Dr Francesco Del Duchetto, University of Lincoln; Dr David McBey, University of Aberdeen; Dr Leonardo Guevara, University of Lincoln

Promoting sustainable and healthy diets in the population is an important promising direction to alleviate the burden on the environment of current food production and consumption practices. Previous research has shown that simple dietary changes by individuals and households can have a great effect in improving human health and curtailing greenhouse gas emissions [4,5], and reducing demand for meat products can help spur changes in food production. This can be achieved, for example, by encouraging the consumption of more plant-based foods through a process called “nudging”, which entails performing interventions to alter people’s behaviour in a predictable way. These direct approaches may be more effective at modifying consumers' behaviour than simple information campaigns [6]. This project explores the effectiveness of automating the provision of nudges with AI and service robotics in food retail locations. This approach could be adopted by supermarkets and restaurants where we can expect robots will be widely deployed in the future as customer assistants.

This project will develop AI methodologies for achieving the following objectives:

Modelling user behaviour in supermarkets, focusing particularly on their food choices and the sustainability of it.
Learn from real-world interactions a decision-making policy for providing food suggestions to nudge consumer behaviour toward making more sustainable choices.

To this aim, the use of social robots as supermarket customer assistants can be an effective mean of intervention to shape consumers choices. Studies have reported that physically present agents (i.e., robots) have greater influence on users than non-physical agents (i.e. tablet/phone apps) with people experiences similar psychological response than in interactions with other humans [1]. In this project, a robot system will be deployed based on existing hardware and software technologies [2], and novel machine learning and reinforcement learning methodologies will be developed for exploring appropriate decision-making policies driving the robot behaviour [3]. Field studies with human participants will be conducted in a supermarket research facility at Riseholme Campus (Lincoln). Customers influence over time will be evaluated using observational studies and quantitative methods, in addition to evaluation of their perception of the robot service in terms of trust, safety and explainability. Final field deployment will be conducted in a real shop in agreement with the industry partner.

[1] Del Duchetto, Francesco; Kucukyilmaz, Ayse; Iocchi, Luca; Hanheide, Marc; "Do not make the same mistakes again and again: Learning local recovery policies for navigation from human demonstrations”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,3,4,4084-4091,2018

[2] Del Duchetto, Francesco; Kucukyilmaz, Ayse; Hanheide, Marc; "In[1]the-Wild Failures in a Long-Term HRI Deployment”, Workshop on Robot Execution Failures and Failure Management Strategies at IEEE ICRA 2023.

[3] Sobrín-Hidalgo, D., González-Santamarta, M. A., Angel, ´, Guerrero[1]Higueras, M., Rodríguez-Lera, F. J., & Matellán-Olivera, V. (n.d.). Explaining Autonomy: Enhancing Human-Robot Interaction through

Explanation Generation with Large Language Models.

[4] David Porfirio, Laura Stegner, Maya Cakmak, Allison Sauppé, Aws Albarghouthi, and Bilge Mutlu. 2023. Sketching Robot Programs On the Fly. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 584–593.

Welcome to the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Sustainable Understandable agri-food Systems Transformed by Artificial INtelligence (SUSTAIN).