How safe are service robots in urban environments? Bullying a robot

Abstract

This paper describes and discusses the preliminary results of a behavioural study on robot social acceptability, which was carried out during a public demonstration in South Korea. Data was collected by means of direct observation of people behaviour during interaction with robots. The most interesting result to emerge is that of young people: they tended to react to the robots presence with extreme curiosity and, quite often, to treat them aggressively. In this paper, the word bullying is used to describe any kind of improper and violent behaviour, intended to cause damages or impede the robot operation. It is the authors' opinion that if not tackled appropriately, abuses towards robots may become a serious hindrance to their future deployment, and safety. Hence, the necessity to tackle this issue with dedicated solutions during the early phases of design

Mindless Robots get Bullied

“…While a variety of scholars have observed abuse of both embodied [26,53] and virtual [11,61] agents, there is still very li le fundamental research on where this behaviour originates from.…”

“…e ba ed scientists had to hastily reach for their cell phones to capture this unexpected form of human-robot interaction. Salvini et al [53] noted that "the nature of the abuses su ered by the robots […] is much more similar to bullying behaviours than vandalism. […] In the case of urban robots, acts of vandalism could be, for instance, crashing the touch screen monitor, se ing re to the robot, or keying the robot cover.…”

“…e cleaning robot from the Salvini et al [53] study is not alone in being abused; Brscić et al [5] observed how kids a acked a robot that was patrolling a shopping mall. A er multiple failed a empts to design robot behaviour that could stop these aggressive tendencies, the authors had to program the robot in such a way that it simply avoided potential bullies (i.e., any kid-sized human).…”

“…Research on the reasons behind robot bullying is still sparse [10] and o en involves anecdotal observations [53]. e current paper will thus dive into the psychological motivations behind robot bullying behaviour.…”

Social Robots: Views of Staff of a Disability Service Organization

“…However at the same time, social robots are seen as a possible way to address the human resource and economic pressures on health care systems (e.g., created by growing elderly populations) [33]. We present here results of an exploratory study that ascertained the so far invisible views of staff of a disability service organization toward social robotics and its various applications covering among others the angle of bullying [34,35].…”