Measuring Attitudes Towards Telepresence Robots

Abstract

Studies using Nomura et al.’s “Negative Attitude toward Robots Scale” (NARS) [1] as an attitudinal measure have featured robots that were perceived to be autonomous, independent agents. State of the art telepresence robots require an explicit human-in-the-loop to drive the robot around. In this paper, we investigate if NARS can be used with telepresence robots. To this end, we conducted three studies in which people watched videos of telepresence robots (n=70), operated telepresence robots (n=38), and interacted with telepresence robots (n=12). Overall, the results from our three studies indicated that NARS may be applied to telepresence robots, and culture, gender, and prior robot experience can be influential factors on the NARS score.