The influence of people’s culture and prior experiences with Aibo on their attitude towards robots

Robots in Education and Care of Children with Developmental Disabilities: A Study on Acceptance by Experienced and Future Professionals

“…The answers are generally negative and reflect the missing knowledge of the languages and tools to program the robot behaviour. In this case, we can hypothesize the participant derived their answers from previous experience with the technology [71].…”

“…The study is limited by the short amount of time that the participants spent interacting with the robot; they could be influenced by the limited previous knowledge of the specific technology [71]. On the other hand, in this work we were not testing a specific platform or the actual use of the robot, but the focus was on their general perception of SAR as a tool for education and care of children with developmental disabilities.…”

What Can We Learn from the Long-Term Users of a Social Robot?

“…The questionnaire was completed by 57 male and 19 female, since two participants did not reveal their gender, with a ratio 73%/24%, similar to another on-line AIBO questionnaire with 64%/36% in [1] and a robotics questionnaire had 61%/39% in [13]. Although there was no question about the income and the wealth of the participants, the authors assume that this rate can be explained with the higher interest of the men in gadgets [12].…”

“…Despite of the participants were recruited on a special internet forum and Facebook, only 78 active Sony AIBO owners were reached, but the authors believe that sample size was reasonable compared to 230 in [1] and 41 in [13] considering that conducting our survey was long after the product discontinuation. The sampling was not representative for the general public, but the participants could provide a good indication about the typical users of entertainment robots and even beyond this group since Bartneck et al found in [1] that owning a Sony AIBO did not result significantly different scores on their NARS questionnaire.…”

“…These robots can walk around the room, interact with the owner and switch between probabilistic state machines to show rich behaviors and engage the owners. Several papers studied AIBO in the past decade, but heavy users were never evaluated directly although Bartneck et al [1] studied the cross-cultural differences how people perceive AIBO after an interaction session and the on-line forums [4] were analyzed to investigate the relationship between the robots and their owners.…”