What makes people accept or reject companion robots?: A research agenda

Abstract

Social companion robots are intentionally developed and designed to support humans in useful tasks and to use social cues to establish a relationship to the user. However, so far no social companion robots existed outside of research labs to perform long-term studies "in the wild", exploring how this relationship actually evolves over time. In this paper we present the research agenda for such a study using the soon commercially available BUDDY robot from Blue Frog Robotics. We chose a sociological ethnographic approach with eight households, methodologically mainly focusing on qualitative data gathered through a series of household visits. For data analysis we aim at extending the Domestic Robot Ecology (DRE), which was originally developed based on ethnographic studies with vacuum cleaning robots, and for data interpretation we base our work on a newly proposed sociological framework, we call everyday-life centered approach (ELCA).