International Journal of Social Robotics最新文献

The willingness to use service robots plays a pivotal role in human–robot interaction. To establish a valid measure in the Chinese context, this study aimed to revisit the validity and reliability of the Service Robot Integration Willingness (SRIW) Scale among Chinese adults. A total of 955 participants were recruited to complete the Chinese version of the SRIW. Our findings revealed a four-factor model comprising 31 items, indicating a strong model fit. Furthermore, trust in automation correlated positively with the Chinese SRIW, while negative attitudes toward robots exhibited a significant inverse correlation, supportting the Chinese SRIW’s substantial criterion-related validity. In conclusion, this article introduces an updated Chinese SRIW, underscoring its efficacy in measuring the readiness to adopt service robots in China.

The discussion around gendering humanoid robots has gained more traction in the last few years. To lay the basis for a full comprehension of how robots’ “gender” has been understood within the Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) community—i.e., how it has been manipulated, in which contexts, and which effects it has yielded on people’s perceptions and interactions with robots—we performed a scoping review of the literature. We identified 553 papers relevant for our review retrieved from 5 different databases. The final sample of reviewed papers included 35 papers written between 2005 and 2021, which involved a total of 3902 participants. In this article, we thoroughly summarize these papers by reporting information about their objectives and assumptions on gender (i.e., definitions and reasons to manipulate gender), their manipulation of robots’ “gender” (i.e., gender cues and manipulation checks), their experimental designs (e.g., demographics of participants, employed robots), and their results (i.e., main and interaction effects). The review reveals that robots’ “gender” does not affect crucial constructs for the HRI, such as likability and acceptance, but rather bears its strongest effect on stereotyping. We leverage our different epistemological backgrounds in Social Robotics and Gender Studies to provide a comprehensive interdisciplinary perspective on the results of the review and suggest ways to move forward in the field of HRI.

Modern developments in speech-enabled drones and aerial manipulation systems (AMS) enable drones to have social interactions with people, which is important for therapeutic applications involving flight and above-eye-level monitoring in people’s homes, but not everyone will accept drones into their daily lives. Consistently assessing who would accept a socially assistive drone into their home is a challenge for roboticists. An animation-based Mechanical Turk survey (N = 176) found that acceptance of a voice-enabled AMS for fatigue – i.e., physical or mental tiredness in the participant’s life – was higher among younger adults with higher education and longer symptoms of fatigue, suggesting demographics and a need for the task performed by the drone are critical factors for drone acceptance. Participants rated the drone as more acceptable for others than for themselves, demonstrating a self-other effect. A second video-based YouGov survey (N = 404) found that younger adults rated an AMS for managing the symptom of day-to-day fatigue as more acceptable than older adults. The self-other effect was reduced among participants who read a situation with specific versus general phrasing of the AMS’s imagined use, suggesting that it may be caused by an attribution bias. These results demonstrate how analyzing demographics and specifying the wording of technology use can more consistently assess to whom drones for fatigue are acceptable, which is of interest to public opinion researchers and roboticists.