Effects of Visual Appearance on the Attribution of Applications in Social Robotics Frank Hegel 1 , Manja Lohse 1 , and Britta Wrede 1 Abstract — This paper investigates the inluence of visual appearance of social robots on judgments about their potential applications. 183 participants rated the appropriateness of thirteen categories of applications for twelve social robots in an online study. The ratings were based on videos displaying the appearance of the robot combined with basic information about the robots’ general functions. The results conirmed the hypothesis that the visual appearance of robots is a signiicant predictor for the estimation of applications in the eye of the beholder. Furthermore, the ratings showed an attractiveness bias: robots being judged as more attractive by the users also received more positive evaluations (i.e., “liking”). I. INTRODUCTION The general objective of social robotics research is to design robots that engage in social scenarios which are compelling and familiar to human beings. Thus, robots have to provide a social communicative functionality that is natural and intuitive. Today, simple social robots are sold as toys. More complicated systems are usually used for research – but these are far from being commercial products. Research on applications offers interesting scientiic challenges: First, many functional as well as socially relevant aspects are only observed when realistic applications are faced. Second, a thorough evaluation of the robot performance that includes social aspects of human-robot interaction gains signiicance from well deined application scenarios. However, we have observed that in experimental settings not only the robot but also the setting of the application need to be explained to users in order for them to engage in a meaningful task-oriented interaction. Especially for naïve users, robots need to be self-explaining. This can be supported by matching visual appearance and functionality with the robot’s tasks. The idea of robots as artiicial beings is hundreds of years old: The original meaning of automaton implies autonomous beings having the ability to move on their own. Vausanson’s lute and tabor player [1] and Wolfgang von Kemepelen’s famous chess player [2], the Turk, designed in the mid-17th century, are early automatons, but they are mainly early encounters between lifelike forms and mechanical machines. These machines invoked people’s projections and expectations due to the lifelike behavior which is displayed by the visual appearance. Altogether, an implicit knowledge exist of what tasks people expect a robot to do and what tasks people expect a robot explicitly not to do due its visual appearance. In the present study we address the lack of systematic research on the relations between the visual appearance of social robots and applications. Therefore, we asked our potential users what applications they expected the twelve social robots could have. This investigation focuses on potential applications for the twelve robots Barthoc Jr., iCat, Aibo, BIRON, KeepOn, Kismet, Leonardo, Robovie, Repliee Q2, Asimo, Paro, and Pearl. Section II gives a brief overview of the related work. Section III introduces the twelve robots and explains the method of the study. In Section IV we discuss the results and inally, Section V concludes this paper. II. RELATED WORK This section address related work regarding deinitions of social robots (Section 2.1), applications for social robots (Section 2.2), and visual appearance of social robots (Section 2.3). Additionally, Section 2.4 gives a short introduction into the attributions due to attractiveness. 2.1 Social Robots Initially, the idea of creating social robots was inspired by biology. Social robots were used to study swarms or the behavior of insects [3]. However, current approaches of social robotics treat the interaction between humans and robots. The term social in this case represents the fact that there are two or more entities within the same physical context [4]. A social robot is able to communicate with human beings, understands and even relates to humans in a personal way. It should be able to understand humans and itself in social terms [5]. Therefore, social robots are explicitly developed for the interaction between humans and robots to support a human- like interaction because the most intuitive and appropriate way to instruct robots is to interact as naturally as humans do in their everyday life. 2.2 Applications for Social Robots The fact that there are only a few commercial applications for social robots today leads to the conclusion that it is challenging to develop useful applications for such robots. Today’s successful application scenarios for robots with the need of social capabilities are almost restricted to research scenarios and toys. But in principal there is the motivation to ind meaningful applications for robots. For instance, based on an interdisciplinary workshop with the goal to conceive 1 Faculty of Technology, Applied Informatics, Bielefeld University, Univer- sitaetsstr. 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany. E-Mail: (fhegel, mlohse, bwrede)@ techfak.uni-bielefeld.de The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication Toyama, Japan, Sept. 27-Oct. 2, 2009 TuIAH.12 978-1-4244-5081-7/09/$26.00 ©2009 IEEE 64