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Social Media in Human–Robot Interaction

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Abstract

The objective of this paper is to discuss and demonstrate in a case study the application of social media as a tool for acceptance, sociability and interaction in human–robot interaction (HRI). By adopting the concept of mediatization as discussed in media and communication studies, we aim to propose an extended usage of social media in the design of robots but also in collecting data on their acceptance and sociability. We aim to provide a starting point for ongoing studies into the extension of HRI evaluation frameworks, which provide additional ways to measure HRI based on a media and communication studies approach. Our discussion is supported by results of an HRI public engagement project, which included a social media strategy. The project was designed around a hitchhiking robot, called hitchBOT, which was dependent on the public’s engagement and support in its hitchhiking objectives. The robot’s social media strategies included accounts and profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and a website. The aim was to use social media in order to engage not only with those people finding hitchBOT on the side of the road, but also a wider international audience. The robot’s social media accounts provided a tool to communicate hitchBOT’s origins, personality, goals, and travels. Our use of social media to communicate hitchBOT’s personality and to instill trust, interest and emotional engagement constituted a novel contribution to the design of social robots and to the scope and scale of evaluation in HRI.

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Notes

  1. This question was designed to kindle discussions around social robots and technology in our societies. This is a common strategy in public engagement projects, which is not to be confounded with research questions (and hypotheses) we formulate in traditional scientific experiments.

  2. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/foursquare/9wzdncrfhw3v.

  3. https://twitter.com/MarsCuriosity.

  4. https://twitter.com/MarsRovers.

  5. https://twitter.com/NaoRobot?lang=eng; https://twitter.com/PepperTheRobot?lang=eng.

  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEg9ay-Wy-M.

  7. With acceptance we refer to both robot or technology acceptance in general on an individual level, such as described with “social acceptance” in [3] but also on a community level in a general sense, as discussed in [4], coming from a social sciences perspective of technology acceptance.

  8. It should be mentioned that most of the interaction data we were able to collect for this project indeed derives from the social media interactions. In order to respect people’s privacy, we did not tape or record any of the direct, physical interactions between the robot and the people who interacted with it during the trip.

  9. If a text is 1000 words long, it is said to have 1000 ‚tokens’. But a lot of these words will be repeated, and there may be only say 400 different words in the text. Types’, therefore, are the different words. The type-token-ratio (TTR) then of this example would be 40% [39].

  10. Please note that the phase of the actual trip contains ends after August 1st, which is when hitchBOT’s death occurred, since the trip officially ended on that day.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Professional Communication, Ryerson University, 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Frauke Zeller & Jacky Au Duong

  2. McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, ON, Canada

    David Harris Smith

  3. Toronto, ON, Canada

    Alanna Mager

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  1. Frauke Zeller
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  4. Alanna Mager
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Correspondence to Frauke Zeller.

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Zeller, F., Smith, D.H., Au Duong, J. et al. Social Media in Human–Robot Interaction. Int J of Soc Robotics 12, 389–402 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00573-4

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