Into the Wild: When Robots Are Not Welcome

TL;DR

This paper discusses the challenges and eventual success in deploying social robots in public spaces, highlighting stakeholder objections and trust-building processes in two distinct settings.

Contribution

It provides a detailed account of practical deployment difficulties and strategies for gaining stakeholder trust in social robot applications.

Findings

Stakeholder objections can hinder robot deployment.

Trust-building is crucial for successful integration.

Deployment success depends on addressing social and technological challenges.

Abstract

Social robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces, where they face not only technological difficulties and unexpected user utterances, but also objections from stakeholders who may not be comfortable with introducing a robot into those spaces. We describe our difficulties with deploying a social robot in two different public settings: 1) Student services center; 2) Refugees and asylum seekers drop-in service. Although this is a failure report, in each use case we eventually managed to earn the trust of the staff and form a relationship with them, allowing us to deploy our robot and conduct our studies.