People's Perception of Domestic Service Robots: Same Household, Same Opinion?

The study presented in this paper examined people's perception of domestic service robots by means of an ethnographic study. We investigated initial reactions of nine households who lived with a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot over a two week period. To explore people's attitude and how it changed over time, we used a recurring questionnaire that was filled at three different times, integrated in 18 semi-structured qualitative interviews. Our findings suggest that being part of a specific household has an impact how each individual household member perceives the robot. We interpret that, even though individual experiences with the robot might differ from one other, a household shares a specific opinion about the robot. Moreover our findings also indicate that how people perceived Roomba did not change drastically over the two week period.

[1]  Anders Green,et al.  Social and collaborative aspects of interaction with a service robot , 2003, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[2]  Ferdinando Fornara,et al.  Robots in a domestic setting: a psychological approach , 2005, Universal Access in the Information Society.

[3]  Alladi Venkatesh,et al.  Computers and other interactive technologies for the home , 1996, CACM.

[4]  John Krumm,et al.  UbiComp 2007: Ubiquitous Computing, 9th International Conference, UbiComp 2007, Innsbruck, Austria, September 16-19, 2007, Proceedings , 2007, UbiComp.

[5]  Peter C. Wright,et al.  Designing culturally situated technologies for the home , 2003, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[6]  Jodi Forlizzi,et al.  How robotic products become social products: An ethnographic study of cleaning in the home , 2007, 2007 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[7]  Viswanath Venkatesh,et al.  Determinants of Perceived Ease of Use: Integrating Control, Intrinsic Motivation, and Emotion into the Technology Acceptance Model , 2000, Inf. Syst. Res..

[8]  Sara B. Kiesler,et al.  Mental models of robotic assistants , 2002, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[9]  Alladi Venkatesh,et al.  The networked home: an analysis of current developments and future trends , 2003, Cognition, Technology & Work.

[10]  E. Rogers,et al.  Diffusion of innovations , 1964, Encyclopedia of Sport Management.

[11]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  Living with Robots: Investigating the Habituation Effect in Participants' Preferences During a Longitudinal Human-Robot Interaction Study , 2007, RO-MAN 2007 - The 16th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[12]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Robots in the wild: Understanding long-term use , 2009, 2009 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[13]  J. Cacioppo,et al.  On seeing human: a three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. , 2007, Psychological review.

[14]  Jodi Forlizzi,et al.  Service robots in the domestic environment: a study of the roomba vacuum in the home , 2006, HRI '06.

[15]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Sketching the future: Assessing user needs for domestic robots , 2009, RO-MAN 2009 - The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[16]  H. Huttenrauch,et al.  Fetch-and-carry with CERO: observations from a long-term user study with a service robot , 2002, Proceedings. 11th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[17]  Clifford Nass,et al.  The media equation - how people treat computers, television, and new media like real people and places , 1996 .

[18]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  What is a robot companion - friend, assistant or butler? , 2005, 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[19]  Author.  “ My Roomba is Rambo ” : Intimate Home Appliances , 2007 .

[20]  Henrik I. Christensen,et al.  Housewives or technophiles?: Understanding domestic robot owners , 2008, 2008 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[21]  Frédéric Kaplan,et al.  Who is Afraid of the Humanoid? Investigating Cultural Differences in the Acceptance of Robots , 2004, Int. J. Humanoid Robotics.

[22]  B. Gates.  A robot in every home. , 2007, Scientific American.