Exploring Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction: What makes people accept or reject companion robots?
Shared Space was planned as a 3-year project, started in 2018 funded by the FWF (Elise Richter programme). The working hypothesis of this project is that the interaction of lay people with a social companion robot (in this project the commercially available robot Anki Vector) changes over time and that its adoption and acceptance differ in terms of the socio-demographic qualities of the involved households.
The main goal is to gain detailed empirical evidence on the adoption and acceptance processes from a relatively small sample (eight households) over a longer period of time (eight months), therefore an ethnographic approach was chosen as methodology. Several household visits accompanied by specific field tools and techniques (semi-structured qualitative interviews, Day Reconstruction Method, drawing/tinkering activities, short questionnaires/rating scales) were planned. A baseline of existing household routines was to be established in a pre-visit before households received an Anki Vector and were firstly regularly visited over a period of six months. After half a year, the absence of Anki Vector and its impact on the social household dynamics were to be studied by giving it back for one month, after a one-month break.
Project Homepage: https://astridweiss.net/services/sharedspace-2018-2022/
Team: Astrid Weiss (Contact Person for HCI Group)