Studies in Public Places as a Means to Positively Influence People's Attitude towards Robots

It is the aim of this paper to show on a meta-level how studies in public places can contribute to positively influence people’s attitude towards robots. By means of examining objective and subjective data gathered in the lab and data from field studies, it will be shown how people’s experiences with a robot outside the sheltering laboratory surroundings can help to value robots more positively. We argue, that studies in public places can serve as a means to enable many people with hands-on experiences and as proof-of-concept evaluation for researchers. We contrasted people’s explicit ratings of our robots and although the differences are rather subtle, they nevertheless reveal a tendency for the positive effect of field studies in public places. Additionally, we contrasted people’s implicit attitude towards robots which could support our assumption that people who interacted with robots in the field rate it significantly better than people who interacted with it in the lab.