Social psychology offers a perspective on the acceptance and adoption of technology that is not often considered in technical circles. In this paper, we discuss several adoption-of-technology models with respect to the acceptance of domestic robots: we examine socialpsychology literature and apply it directly to humanrobot interaction. We raise key points that we feel will be pivotal to how domestic users respond to robots, and provide a set of guidelines that roboticists and designers of robotic interfaces can use to consider and analyze their designs. Ultimately, understanding how users respond to robots and the reasons behind their responses will enable designers to creating domestic robots that are accepted into homes.

Drivers use nonverbal cues such as vehicle speed, eye gaze, and hand gestures to communicate awareness and intent to pedestrians. Conversely, in autonomous vehicles, drivers can be distracted or absent, leaving pedestrians to infer awareness and intent from the vehicle alone. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of interfaces (beyond vehicle movement) that explicitly communicate awareness and intent of autonomous vehicles to pedestrians, focusing on crosswalk scenarios. We conducted a preliminary study to gain insight on designing interfaces that communicate autonomous vehicle awareness and intent to pedestrians. Based on study outcomes, we developed four prototype interfaces and deployed them in studies involving a Segway and a car. We found interfaces communicating vehicle awareness and intent: (1) can help pedestrians attempting to cross; (2) are not limited to the vehicle and can exist in the environment; and (3) should use a combination of modalities like visual, auditory, and physical.

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The experience of interacting with a robot has been shown to be very different in comparison to people's interaction experience with other technologies and artifacts, and often has a strong social or emotional componenta difference that poses potential challenges related to the design and evaluation of HRI. In this paper we explore this difference, and its implications on evaluating HRI. We outline how this difference is due in part to the general complexity of robots' overall context of interaction, related to their dynamic presence in the real world and their tendency to invoke a sense of agency.We suggest that due to these differences HCI evaluation methods should be applied to HRI with care, and we present a survey of select HCI evaluation techniques from the perspective of the unique challenges of robots. We propose a view on social interaction with robots that we call the holistic interaction experience, and introduce a set of three perspectives for exploring social interaction with robots: visceral factors of interaction, social mechanics, and social structures. We demonstrate how our three perspectives can be used in practice, both as guidelines to discuss and categorize robot interaction, and as a component in the evaluation process. Further, we propose an original heuristic for brainstorming various possibilities of interaction experiences based on a concept we call the interaction experience map.

This paper details the design and evaluation of the Delphian Desktop, a mechanism for online spatial prediction of cursor movements in a Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers (WIMP) environment. Interaction with WIMP-based interfaces often becomes a spatially challenging task when the physical interaction mediators are the common mouse and a high resolution, physically large display screen. These spatial challenges are especially evident in overly crowded Windows desktops. The Delphian Desktop integrates simple yet effective predictive spatial tracking and selection paradigms into ordinary WIMP environments in order to simplify and ease pointing tasks. Predictions are calculated by tracking cursor movements and estimating spatial intentions using a computationally inexpensive online algorithm based on estimating the movement direction and peak velocity. In testing the Delphian Desktop effectively shortened pointing time to faraway icons, and reduced the overall physical distance the mouse (and user hand) had to mechanically traverse.