Working with a service robot - Case Kalle the robot in hotel Hanaholmen
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Journal Title
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2024
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Information and Service Management (ISM)
Language
en
Pages
98
Series
Abstract
The collaboration of employees and service robots, along with the fit of the robot for its task, becomes relevant when robots start assisting at work. This thesis investigates the integration of a mobile delivery robot named Kalle into a service work task in a Finnish hotel and offers insights for both research and practice. The robot’s task was to deliver room service orders to customers’ hotel rooms. A qualitative approach was utilized to investigate hotel employees’ perspectives on working with the robot. In this work, a research framework drawing from the Technology-to-Performance Chain model was developed. The research framework was applied to examine the performance outcomes of collaboration and the factors that influenced the effectiveness of collaboration. The findings of this study are based on 22 face-to-face interviews with hotel employees, which were analyzed using a hybrid approach. The identified collaboration performance outcomes included outcomes related to taskwork, which were task time and speed, error rate, output quality, and task shaping. In addition, the performance outcomes included subjective outcomes, which consisted of workload, attribution, acceptance, satisfaction, collaboration viability, and the meaningfulness of work. The findings suggest that the fit between the robot and its task, along with the utilization rate of the robot, influenced the performance outcomes. The results suggested that the robot’s low utilization rate and occasional error behavior increased the mental workload of some participants. Because of the low utilization rate, the robot did not significantly reduce the physical workload of employees. Employees’ acceptance of the robot’s use depended on the work task assigned to it and the fact that the robot would not become an additional burden. By and large, the robot was perceived positively among participants, and delivering room service orders was considered a suitable task for the robot.Description
Thesis advisor
Tuunainen, VirpiKeywords
service robot, human-robot collaboration, case study, performance outcomes