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

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  • Presented at: 3rd International Conference on Social Robotics, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 24-25, 2011
  • Published in: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Social Robotics, ICSR 2011, p. 204-213
  • Series: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 7072
  • Springer, 2011

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.

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