Into the Wild: When Robots Are Not Welcome

-- 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. We have developed a multilingual robot system (Figure 1) described in [1] for two different use cases: 1) Supporting newly arrived international students in a UK university, answering frequently asked questions; 2) Supporting refugees and asylum seekers with navigating bureaucratic processes. Like most current public-space robot deployments, our field studies involved adding a robot to an existing workplace, with stakeholders including management, visitors, as well as front-line workers who should all be consulted to develop the details of the system to be deployed.