About MuMMER
MuMMER (MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot) was a four-year, EU-funded project that ran from 2016-2020 with the overall goal of developing 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, worked together with stakeholders including customers, retailers, and business managers to develop truly engaging robot behaviours. Crucially, our robot exhibited behaviour that was socially appropriate: combining speech-based interaction with non-verbal communication and human-aware navigation. To support this behaviour, we have developed and integrated new methods from audiovisual scene processing, social-signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation. Throughout the project, the robot was deployed in Ideapark, a large public shopping mall in Finland.