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

Abstract

Abstract. Despite the recent technological advances, long-term experiments with robots have challenges to keep the users interested after the initial excitement disappears. This paper explores the user expectations by analyzing the long-term owners of Sony AIBO who have been using these robots for years (heavy users). 78 participants filled an on-line questionnaire and their answers were inspected to discover the key needs of this user group. Quantitative and textual methods confirmed that the most-wanted skills were the interaction with humans and the autonomous operation. The integration with the AI agents and Internet services was important, but the long-term memory and learning capabilities were not that relevant for the participants as expected. The diverse preferences between robot skills led to the creation of a prioritized recommendation list to complement the design guidelines for social robots in the literature.

Long-Term Value of Social Robots through the Eyes of Expert Users

“…With combined insights from the literature on social and domestic robots, together with IPAs, the importance of managing expectations [38,45] and perceptions of different populations [20,22,36,38,42,50,61], development [23] and changes over time [15] (including maintenance routines [23,59], and updates to the robots [35]), usefulness [49], personification [41,46], task completion [37], familiarity [18], the overall shape and motion [6,63,65], and context [11,24,40] were all emphasized.…”

“…The research into the specifics of what it means for a social robot to be useful, evaluated in naturalistic settings remains scarce [35]. The long-term value of social robots is not very well known in the commercial circles either, given the number of them advertised [2,10], but later severely limited or never rolled out at all [43].…”

“…Expectation management played out in a similar vein to existing robot acceptance frameworks [15,59], where, upon trial user expectations were broken. Participants extracted much value by developing applications for Pepper, which accords with the importance of development [23] and changes over time [15] (including maintenance routines [23,59], and updates [35]). In this case, the updates came both from SoftBank (the company behind Pepper), and from the users themselves.…”

Exploratory analysis of Sony AIBO users

“…Other Likert-type items queried technical aspects to identify wishes for specific skills of these social robots and the remaining questions collected answers about the connectivity options, autonomous behavior and possible user contributions. Several questions included text fields where the participants could enter additional comments in a free form, but those answers were analyzed in a previous paper of the authors [29]. 78 fillings were collected from the members of an English speaking on-line AIBO forum (http://aibo-life.org) what is similar to 70 in [7] and 17 Japanese participants were reached via Facebook ad campaign, similar to [14].…”

“…Leite et al [11] presented a good review of this problem with a detailed discussion by accumulating the experiences of different robots in the research literature while [8] expressed their recommendations on a higher level. The authors reviewed the free-form answers of the questionnaire in an earlier work [29] and some proposals were already given to the literature. Based upon the quantitative analysis in this paper, additional suggestions are presented here in descending priority to complement the past works [8,11]:…”