What Could Go Wrong: Lessons Learned When Doing HRI User Studies with Off-the-Shelf Social Robots

Today, off-the-shelf social robots are used increasingly in the HRI community to research social interactions with different target user groups across a range of domains (e.g. healthcare, education, retail and other public spaces). We invite everyone doing HRI studies with end users, in the lab or in the wild, to collect past experiences of methods and practices that had issues or did not turn out as expected. This could include but is not limited to experimental setup, unplanned interactions, or simply the difficulty in transferring theory to the real world. In order to be able to generalize and compare differences across multiple HRI domains and create common solutions, we are focusing in this workshop on experiences with often used off-the-shelf social robots. We are interested in identifying the underlying causes of the unexpected HRI results, e.g. the contextual, task, and user related factors that influence interaction with a robot platform. We will furthermore discuss and document (ad hoc) solutions and/or lessons learned such that they can be shared with the HRI community. As well as sharing specific case studies documenting real world HRI experiences, we further hope to inspire the continued sharing of open and insightful reflections within the HRI community.