Robots have entered our domestic lives, but yet, little is known about their impact on the home. This paper takes steps towards addressing this omission, by reporting results from an empirical study of iRobot's Roomba™, a vacuuming robot. Our findings suggest that, by developing intimacy to the robot, our participants were able to derive increased pleasure from cleaning, and expended effort to fit Roomba into their homes, and shared it with others. These findings lead us to propose four design implications that we argue could increase people's enthusiasm for smart home technologies.

It has been recognized that long-term effects exist in the interaction with robotic technologies. Despite this recognition, we still know little about how the temporal effects are associated with domestic robots. To bridge this gap, we undertook a long-term field study. We distributed Roomba vacuuming robots to 30 households, and observed the use over six months. During this study, which spans over 149 home visits, we identified how householders accepted robots as a part of the households via four temporal stages of pre-adoption, adoption, adaptation, and use/retention. With these findings, we took the first step toward establishing a framework, Domestic Robot Ecology (DRE). It shows a holistic view on the relationships that robots shape in the home. Further, it articulates how those relationships change over time. We suggest that DRE can become a useful tool to help design toward long-term acceptance of robotic technologies in the home.

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.

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