Human Perception of Domestic Robots

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Robots are now used in domestic environments to perform a range of useful tasks or functions. Thus, it is required that they must carry out these tasks or functions in a manner that is socially acceptable, comfortable and effective for people it shares the environment with and interacts with. In order to have an effective human-robot interaction, physical embodiment and behavior of domestic robots played a significant role.

Previous studies have proved that the physical appearance of domestic robots had an impact on the expectations of people from the domestic robots. In general, their expectations were greatly influenced from sci-fi movies and media that show destruction caused by robots. Thus, people wanted robots to be non-autonomous, intelligent and fully-controlled by humans. For example, people considered tall humanoid robot more responsible whereas short humanoid robot was though out as more childlike and unable to perform the tasks efficiently.

Moreover, people belonging to different age groups, for instance, young or elderly people held opposing views in their perception of domestic robot. Young people were more inspiring and had strong attraction towards robots whereas elderly people were fear of their autonomy and malfunctioning. So, young people prefer to have humanoid robots for companionship whereas elderly people want them to looklike machines and capable of doing their tasks perfectly. Hence, people have great expectations from domestic robots. They expect that robots assist or accompany them in their busy lives but should be under their full-control and intelligent as they do not want to get in any kind of trouble.

In addition, user’s preferences of appearance of robots were affected by the individual’s per...

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