Faulty Coffees: Barriers to Adoption of an In-the-wild Robo-Barista
🤖 AI Summary
This study investigates whether task-oriented storytelling can enhance users’ long-term willingness to interact with service robots and identifies practical barriers to sustained use in real-world settings. A five-week longitudinal field experiment was conducted in a community of residents aged 50+ in Stockton, UK, deploying a Furhat robot as a barista to compare narrative versus non-narrative dialogue modes. The research foregrounds often-overlooked contextual factors—such as technical reliability, environmental accessibility, and social dynamics—and proposes a reflective framework for long-term human-robot interaction grounded in authentic deployment contexts. Findings reveal predominantly one-time engagements and low repeat interaction rates, underscoring the critical influence of system robustness, environmental fit, and socio-situational factors on the real-world adoption of service robots.
Application Category
📝 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.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Human-Robot Interaction
service robot
longitudinal study
in-the-wild deployment
user engagement
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
in-the-wild deployment
longitudinal HRI
service robot adoption
narrative engagement
accessibility barriers
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