| Abstract | In recent years industrial robots have been successfully established because they fulfil meaningful tasks in production. In contrast the question of applications for social robots is still open. For quite some time they have only been used in research or at best as simple toys by real users in everyday life situations. However, we suggest that there are still unknown application fields that are suitable for existing robots. Therefore, our approach is to show short movies and descriptions of real robots to participants and ask whether there are any specific tasks these robots could perform in the naive users’ everyday life. The systems’ appearance and abilities strongly influence the user’s expectations, that’s why we suppose that we will find strong differences between zoomorphic robots like AIBO and iCat and other robots like BIRON (functional design) and BARTHOC (humanoid). We have conducted an online study with more than 100 participants to test this hypothesis. At first sight there seems to be a contradiction between subjects stating they wanted to use BIRON most and the preference for owning AIBO. Looking at the applications mentioned for BIRON it becomes obvious that participants ascribe tasks in the public like ”guide” to it which explains the difference. The majority of participants (57,0%) thinks that interaction with AIBO would be most enjoyable and rate AIBO (47,4%) and iCat (39,6%) as most likeable (Table 5). This might be due to appearance, social cues or familiarity. This question should be addressed by further research. Nevertheless, no matter why people prefer the robotic animals when asked for likeability, the results indicate, that zoomorphic design might be recommendable for future systems. 6 Conclusion In this paper we tried to show in a first exploratory study that users should be included in the process of finding new applications for social robots. We propose that this is essential especially for the increasing number of off-the-shelf robotic platforms. A carefully designed application needs to consider a frequent tendency of users to reject all kinds of social robots. Furthermore, we found that the appearance of a robot strongly influences the user’s perception. Thus, it should - as well as the functionality - be in the focus of design decisions. In contrast to the humanoid robot BARTHOC and the functionally designed robot BIRON, AIBO and iCat are above all seen as toys. Future development will show whether their appearance is also suited for other applications like robotic interfaces, business, or security. |
