Human-robot social distance in interaction design for robot acceptance

Abstract

The vision for the role of robots in society is expanding beyond that of functional applications or tools in factories and hazardous environments toward social assistants, collaborators, and companions that cohabit with humans. As this is happening, researchers in the field of human-robot interaction and even human-computer interaction are trying to support natural interactions between humans and robots through research on robots’ recognition technology. Human beings are unconsciously motivated to affiliate with anything that has socially interpretable cues; it implies that humans would adopt socially interactive robots as social being. For this reason, it is crucial for designers to care about design for socially acceptable robots beyond well-functioning robots or pleasurable robots. Furthermore, it would be possible to propose a new design direction that leads to synergy effects between humans and technologies.

Humans determine their social acceptance of an object on the basis of their experiences shaped in the process of perceiving and dealing with an object. In sociology, research has discussed the concept of social distance with a metaphor for “proximity”, to explain a social acceptance phenomenon. Perspectives on social distance have been divided into: social distance displaying individuals’ emotional acceptance of others, and social distance referring to comparable features that makes difference between oneself and others. The aim of this study is to understand the phenomenon of social acceptance of robots and to establish design knowledge applicable to human-robot interaction design. This study sought to address following two questions: How is people’s willingness to socially accept robots formed? How can designers bring social acceptance of robots raise up?

First, this dissertation attempted to understand the nature of human-robot social distance by investigating factors shaping social distance in the context of human-robot interaction. Through lite...