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.
@article{arxiv.2508.12075,
title = {Into the Wild: When Robots Are Not Welcome},
author = {Shaul Ashkenazi and Gabriel Skantze and Jane Stuart-Smith and Mary Ellen Foster},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.12075},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted at the workshop on Real-World HRI in Public and Private Spaces: Successes, Failures, and Lessons Learned (PubRob-Fails), held at the IEEE RO-MAN Conference, 2025. 3 pages