Trash Barrel Robots in the City

Abstract

We deployed two trash barrel robots in New York City to study people's interactions with autonomous everyday objects in public spaces. We used a Wizard-of-Oz technique for in-the-wild deployment to simulate robots' autonomy and elicit natural interaction behaviors. This work extends previous research on trash barrel robots toward multi-robot interactions in an urban environment. Our video shows that people in public generally welcome the robots, that the robots encourage social interaction among strangers, that people feel pressure to generate garbage for the robots, and that people's interactions assume the robots' awareness of each other.