What makes people accept a robot in a social environment - discussion from six-week study in an office -

In the near future, robots are expected to play active roles in human communities. After this time arrives, robots will need to be socially accepted by the people in the communities to which they belong. However, it remains unknown what issues must be resolved to make robots socially accepted. In this paper, we point out the three criteria with which people in communities evaluate a robot and three types of relations people have with the robot. We conducted a six-week study in an office to statistically test the relationship between the evaluations and how well a robot is accepted depending on relation types. We probe that by improving behaviors in the criteria the robot will be more accepted by each type of people. Then, the discussion are presented about the most important issues regarding the social acceptance of robots.