Faulty Coffees: Barriers to Adoption of an In-the-wild Robo-Barista

TL;DR

This study investigates the challenges faced in deploying a Robo-Barista in a real-world setting over five weeks, highlighting barriers like technical issues, accessibility, and social factors affecting long-term engagement.

Contribution

The paper provides an in-depth analysis of practical barriers encountered in long-term in-the-wild human-robot interaction studies, emphasizing real-world complexities often overlooked.

Findings

Low repeat interaction rates observed

Technical breakdowns impacted engagement

Accessibility and social barriers influenced user experience

Abstract

We set out to study whether task-based narratives could influence long-term engagement with a service robot. To do so, we deployed a Robo-Barista for five weeks in an over-50's housing complex in Stockton, England. Residents received a free daily coffee by interacting with a Furhat robot assigned to either a narrative or non-narrative dialogue condition. Despite designing for sustained engagement, repeat interaction was low, and we encountered curiosity trials without retention, technical breakdowns, accessibility barriers, and the social dynamics of a housing complex setting. Rather than treating these as peripheral issues, we foreground them in this paper. We reflect on the in-the-wild realities of our experiment and offer lessons for conducting longitudinal Human-Robot Interaction research when studies unravel in practice.