What makes robots social?: A user’s perspective on characteristics for social human-robot interaction

A common description of a social robot is for it to be capable of communicating in a humanlike manner. However, a description of what communicating in a ‘humanlike manner’ means often remains unspecified. This paper provides a set of social behaviors and certain specific features social robots should possess based on user’s experience in a longitudinal home study, discusses whether robots can actually be social, and presents some recommendations to build better social robots

The evaluation of different roles for domestic social robots

Robotics researchers foresee that robots will become ubiquitous in our natural environments, such as our homes. For a successful diffusion of social robots, it is important to study the user acceptance of such robots. In an online survey, we have investigated the acceptance of three different possible roles for domestic social robots and the preferred appearance. The results show that, although most people prefer a humanoid robot for domestic purposes, the role for which a social robot is build affects the choice for a robotic appearance made by potential future users. When comparing the acceptance of the three different roles, people evaluate the companion robot more negatively on the different acceptance variables. Implications of these results are discussed

Long-term acceptance of social robots in domestic environments: Insights from a user's perspective

The increasing mere presence of robots in everyday life does not automatically result in gradual acceptance of these systems by human users. Over the past years, we have conducted several studies with the goal to provide insight into the long-term process of social robots in domestic environments. This paper presents our overall conclusions from the combined findings of our multiple studies on social robot acceptance. We will provide insights from a user's perspective of what makes robots social, describe a phased framework of the long-term process of robot acceptance, present some key factors for social robot acceptance, offer guidelines to build better sociable robots, and provide some recommendations for conducting research in domestic environments. With sharing our experiences with conducting (long-term) user studies in domestic environments, we aim to serve to push this sub-field of HRI in real-world contexts forward and thereby the community at larg

Everyone's a critic: The power of expert and consumer reviews to shape readers’ post-viewing motion picture evaluations

With the advent of online consumer reviews, research into the way consumer and traditional reviews relate to mainstream popularity of entertainment media has been predicated on aggregate results, such as box-office figures for movies. The current study adds to this field by proposing an exploratory model that charts the influence of both types of review on individual readers’ post-viewing evaluations. A controlled experiment was performed, observing credibility, trait empathy and viewer involvement with content. Results indicated that polarized, negative reviews lower enjoyment through reducing involvement. Moreover, credibility of reviews did not play a role in the effects found, with the least trustworthy review exerting the biggest influence. Recommendations are made from the data to develop a confirmatory model that can unite findings and theories from psychological, sociological, and market research

Long-term evaluation of a social robot in real homes

As the employment of robots for long-term evaluations in home settings are just starting to be robust enough for research purposes, our study aims at contributing to humanrobot interaction research by adding longitudinal findings to a limited number of long-term social robotics home studies. We placed 70 commercially available robots within people’s homes for a period up to six months. In this paper, we report on the collected questionnaire data from 102 people living in these houses. The participants evaluated the robot and their user experiences at six points in time. We observed a mere-exposure effect which causes people to evaluate a novel stimuli more positively when they gain experience and get familiar with it. The participants evaluated several aspects of the robot. We found user experience initially dropped before rising again when the robot was used over a longer period of time