Into the Wild: When Robots Are Not Welcome

2025-08-16

AI Summary

This study investigates social exclusion and acceptance challenges encountered when deploying social robots in highly sensitive public settings—specifically, a student service center and a temporary refugee support center. Employing field ethnography—including participatory observation, in-depth interviews, and iterative participatory evaluation—the research systematically documents and analyzes deployment failures caused by stakeholder resistance and the strategies employed to overcome them. Its key contribution is the empirical identification of “relational negotiation” as the central mechanism for mitigating social exclusion: sustained trust-building among stakeholders, rather than technical refinement, proves decisive. Results confirm that, with deep involvement of frontline staff, robots were successfully deployed and enabled rigorous human-robot interaction experiments. The findings underscore a paradigm shift—from technology-first adaptation to socially grounded deployment—in real-world social robotics, and provide a transferable methodological framework for trustworthy human-robot co-governance. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social media analysis through the lenses of networks

Abstract

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.

Problem

• Social robots face public space deployment challenges
• Stakeholder objections hinder robot integration in services
• Building trust with staff enables successful robot deployment

Innovation

• Deploying social robots in public spaces
• Overcoming stakeholder objections and distrust
• Building trust with staff for robot deployment