On robot acceptance and adoption a case study

Abstract

Robotic science and industry have been developing for many years so that nowadays we are witnessing some remarkable achievement and ever-progressing advancements in this field. However, this is only one side of the coin of technology. The other and in some cases the most important aspect in this regard is the acceptance and adoption (A&A) of such a technology by the users, i.e. humans. Generally, being accepted may guarantee survival and development of a technology and more a technology affects users' life, more important is studying its acceptance conditions and its bilateral interaction with humans. Specifically, in the case of robots as a pioneer technological creature which thought to be extensively involved in different dimensions of humans' life, the acceptance and of course adoption issues are of high importance. Therefore, conducting studies around this subject matter introduces two main benefits: First, it gives a comprehensive sociological view of the users' community, their concerns, expectations and challenges towards acceptance of robots. Then, the actual technology perspective with respect to true needs and requirements of human users will be identified in order to plan for the next big things in the field. In this regard, many research studies that targeted different communities have been conducted around the world so far. Following such studies, in this paper, the titular topic is investigated. To our knowledge, this is the first of such studies that targeted an Iranian community. The authors believe that outcome of this research study could be come in handy in order to fill the gap between scientific robotic researches and real world robot employment in the context of Iran.