Negative affect in human robot interaction — Impoliteness in unexpected encounters with robots

The vision of social robotics sees robots moving more and more into unrestricted social environments, where robots interact closely with users in their everyday activities, maybe even establishing relationships with the user over time. In this paper we present a field trial with a robot in a semipublic place. Our analysis of the interactions with casual users shows that it is not enough to focus on modeling behavior that is similar to successful human interactions but that we have to take more deviant ways of interaction like abuse and impoliteness into account when we send robots into the users´ environments. The analysis uses impoliteness theory as an analytical toolbox and exemplifies which strategies are employed by users in unexpected encounters with a humanoid robot.