Robot Futures: Using Theatre to Influence Acceptance of Care Robots

Robots are increasingly used in health care settings, e.g., as homecare assistants and personal companions. One challenge for personal robots in the home is acceptance. We describe an innovative approach to influencing the acceptance of care robots using theatrical performance. Live performance is a useful testbed for developing and evaluating what makes robots expressive; it is also a useful platform for designing robot behaviors and dialogue that result in believable characters. Therefore theatre is a valuable testbed for studying human-robot interaction (HRI). We investigate how audiences perceive social robots interacting with humans in a future care scenario through a scripted performance. We discuss our methods and initial findings, and outline future work.