Long-Term Acceptance of Social Robots in Domestic Environments: Insights from a User’s Perspective

The increasing mere presence of robots in everyday life does not automatically result in gradual acceptance of these systems by human users. Over the past years, we have conducted several studies with the goal to provide insight into the long-term process of social robots in domestic environments. This paper presents our overall conclusions from the combined findings of our multiple studies on social robot acceptance. We will provide insights from a user’s perspective of what makes robots social, describe a phased framework of the long-term process of robot acceptance, present some key factors for social robot acceptance, offer guidelines to build better sociable robots, and provide some recommendations for conducting research in domestic environments. With sharing our experiences with conducting (long-term) user studies in domestic environments, we aim to serve to push this sub-field of HRI in real-world contexts forward and thereby the community at large.