How Humanlike Should a Social Robot Be: A User-Centered Exploration
Robot designers commonly emphasize humanlikeness as an important design feature to make robots social or user-friendly. To understand how users make sense of the design characteristics of robots, we asked 6 participants to classify and interpret the appearance of existing robots in relation to their function and potential usefulness. All the robots had humanlike aspects in their design, and participants most commonly remarked on these humanlike features of the robots. However, the commonsense logic of the “Uncanny Valley” (UV) in HRI design, which suggests that robots should be similar to humans to some degree without being too humanlike, was not supported by participant comments, which did not correlate humanlikeness to user-friendliness in line with the UV hypothesis. Rather, participants related the design features of robots to their everyday contexts, and focused their commentary on context-dependent design implications. As a result, we suggest our understanding of the design characteristics of robots should include the perspectives of users from the earliest stages of design so we can understand their contextual interpretations of different design characteristics. Open and modularized technical platforms could support the inclusion of users in the creation of future social robots.