THIS JUST IN: HUMANOID ROBOTS FREAK PEOPLE OUT

I keep on wondering why robotics researchers persist in designing humanoid robots specifically for domestic applications… Quite often, it seems to because they figure if the robot looks like a person, then it’ll be easier for people to relate to it and become comfortable having it in their home.

Such figuring isn’t quite right, and in fact may be entirely wrong, at least according to this 2008 study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and EPFL\. Researchers surveyed 240 people at a home and living exhibition in Geneva about their feelings on robots in their lives, and came up with some interesting data, including the above graph which shows pretty explicitly that having domestic robots that look like humans (or even “creatures”) is not a good idea, and is liable to make people uncomfortable.

The location for the survey was chosen because the people attending the exhibition weren’t interested in robots specifically, but rather home technology in general, making them potential early adopters for robots in the home. And since they decided that going to a home and living exhibition was a fun way to spend their time, it’s probably safe to assume that they’d spent some time thinking about what they would and wouldn’t like to get out of a robot. After the jump, more data on what respondents see robots doing for them in the near future.

The researchers point out that tasks involving relationships score far lower than general manual labor replacement, suggesting that people aren’t interested (at this point) in dealing with a robot on any deeper level than as a tool (although that may change with use). Personally, I was rather disappointed to see driving get such a negative response. It makes sense, I suppose, since also getting negative responses were other tasks in which a robot was put in a position where it would have direct control over the safety of a human… But, we waste so much time on driving, and we’re getting so close to having robots be able to do it, that it’s discouraging to see such a negative perception of the concept. I mean, come on, you’d really rather have a robot wash your car than drive you around in it?

You can download the entire paper here; reading it is definitely worth your time. Note that (for me at least) the font associated with the graphs is bugged. By copying and pasting the symbols into a different program, you can read them, but I’d recommend just reading the data summaries in the paper.