A methodological variation for acceptance evaluation of Human-Robot Interaction in public places

It could show that breaching experiments can be a useful method to investigate social acceptance in the field, and gather feedback using questionnaires to estimate whether this method can be beneficially to evaluate social acceptance.

Abstract

Several variations of methodological approaches are used to study the social acceptance in human-robot interaction. Due to the introduction of robots in the home, working practice and usage typically informing the design of new forms of technology are missing. Studying social acceptance in human-robot interaction thus needs new methodological concepts. We propose a so called breaching experiment with additional ethnographic observation to close this gap. To investigate the methodological concept we have been conducting a field trial on a public place. We gathered feedback using questionnaires, in order to estimate whether this method can be beneficially to evaluate social acceptance. We could show that breaching experiments can be a useful method to investigate social acceptance in the field.