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Living with a Vacuum Cleaning Robot

A 6-month Ethnographic Study

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Abstract

Little is known about the usage, adoption process and long-term effects of domestic service robots in people’s homes. We investigated the usage, acceptance and process of adoption of a vacuum cleaning robot in nine households by means of a six month ethnographic study. Our major goals were to explore how the robot was used and integrated into daily practices, whether it was adopted in a durable way, and how it impacted its environment. We studied people’s perception of the robot and how it evolved over time, kept track of daily routines, the usage patterns of cleaning tools, and social activities related to the robot. We integrated our results in an existing framework for domestic robot adoption and outlined similarities and differences to it. Finally, we identified several factors that promote or hinder the process of adopting a domestic service robot and make suggestions to further improve human-robot interactions and the design of functional home robots toward long-term acceptance.

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Notes

  1. Social implications of home technologies and domestic robots, such as intimacy, affective quality, and emotional attachment have been studied in more detail [10, 22, 28, 37].

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Acknowledgements

We thank all our participants for their engagement in the study as well as iRobot and iRobotics GmbH Switzerland for their support. Thanks also to the reviewers and to JaYoung Sung. This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the National Centre of Competence in Research Robotics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer-Human Interaction in Learning and Instruction (CHILI), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Rolex Learning Center, Station 20, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Julia Fink, Valérie Bauwens, Frédéric Kaplan & Pierre Dillenbourg

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  1. Julia Fink
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  2. Valérie Bauwens
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  3. Frédéric Kaplan
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  4. Pierre Dillenbourg
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Correspondence to Julia Fink.

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Fink, J., Bauwens, V., Kaplan, F. et al. Living with a Vacuum Cleaning Robot. Int J of Soc Robotics 5, 389–408 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-013-0190-2

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