Gualzru's path to the advertisement world

This paper describes the genesis of Gualzru, a robot commissioned by a large Spanish technological company to provide advertisement services in open public spaces. Gualzru has to stand by at an interactive panel observing the people passing by and, at some point, select a promising candidate and approach her to initiate a conversation. After a small verbal interaction, the robot is supposed to convince the passerby to walk back to the panel, leaving the rest of the selling task to an interactive software embedded in it. The whole design and building process took less than three years of team composed of five groups at different geographical locations. We describe here the lessons learned during this period of time, from different points of view including the hardware, software, architectural decisions and team collaboration issues.