Abstract
Understanding user perceptions is particularly important in developing social robots, which tend to have a high degree of interaction with humans. However, psychometric measures of robot acceptability have only recently started to become available. The present critical review outlines the psychometrically validated questionnaires to measure social acceptability factors related to social robots. Using an iterative search strategy, articles were identified that reported on the development of such questionnaires as well as information about their psychometric properties. Six questionnaires were identified that provide researchers with options varying in length, content, and factor structure. Two of these questionnaires inquire about attitudes and anxieties related to robots, while two others capture a larger range of attitudes that extends to positive and neutral aspects as well. One of the questionnaires reviewed here was specific to inquiring about ethical issues related to the use of social robots for therapy with children with autism, and the last one was designed to provide an assessment of expectations of participants prior to interacting with a robot. Overall, the use of robot acceptability measures is still relatively new, and further psychometric work is necessary to provide confidence in the validity and reliability of these scales.
Highlights
With rapid advancements in robot technology, the functions of robots in society are continuously expanding and diversifying
The present review identified six scales that met the criteria of being measures of robot acceptability and having information available about their psychometric properties
A variety of psychometrically validated scales are available to measure the acceptability of social robots, both for specific applications as well as for assessment of more general attitudes
Summary
With rapid advancements in robot technology, the functions of robots in society are continuously expanding and diversifying. A social robot has been defined as “an autonomous or semi-autonomous robot that interacts and communicates with humans by following the behavioral norms expected by the people with whom the robot is intended to interact” [2] The first social robots were made for entertainment purposes such as robotic toys [3], but later models increasingly permitted reciprocal interaction, such as response by the robot to the user’s emotional state [4]. Robots can acquire a social function by extending their primary design purpose, such as through modifications to an industrial robot, to play an interactive game [5]. Because of the close nature of human-robot interaction in social robotics, understanding human user perspectives is a vital element, right from the early stages of robot development [6]. User studies have investigated the effects of a broad range of specific factors, such as different robot morphologies (e.g., humanoid, animalian, or mechanistic) on user acceptance [7], variation in affective facial expressions [8], cultural distance and language [9,10], communicative non-verbal behaviors such as Robotics 2019, 8, 88; doi:10.3390/robotics8040088 www.mdpi.com/journal/robotics
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