On robot acceptance and adoption a case study

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2018 Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (IRANOPEN)
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On robot acceptance and adoption
A Case Study
Morteza Moradi
Electrical Engineering Department
University of Zanjan
Zanjan, Iran
Morteza.Moradi@znu.ac.ir
Mohammad Moradi
Young Researchers and Elite Club, Qazvin Branch
Islamic Azad University
Qazvin, Iran
Moradi.c85@gmail.com
Farhad Bayat
Electrical Engineering Department
University of Zanjan
Zanjan, Iran
Bayat.Farhad@znu.ac.ir
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.
Keywords; Robot Acceptance; Human-Robot Interaction;
Acceptance Model; Technology Acceptance Model
I.
I
NTRODUCTION
Over the years, there have been many advancements in the
development of robotics and its related fields. Nowadays, we
are witnessing robots which can do something useful in the
real world situations rather than early days' robots. In this
regard, robot in its different types and classes are leveraged in
various applications [1-4]. In addition to technical
achievements, robots as a pioneer technology should be
considered from another perspective. In fact, any technology,
regardless of its applications and characteristics, should be
measured against an important criterion, namely acceptance
by users. This implies to the fact that whether consumers and
users accept the technology and how they adopt to that.
Therefore, more a given technology affects users' life, more it
is needed to study its acceptance conditions. Such a study,
also, provide invaluable insights on what users think about the
technology, what they expect from that, how they prefer to
interact with/leverage it and so on. Since robots have been
thought to work with humans in a close relationship,
considering A&A issues are of high importance. In other
words, such an acceptance is vital for the robots, especially for
social ones. For this reason, many studies have been
conducted on different aspects of the topic, including works
done in [5-9]. Following such studies, in this paper a
preliminary research has been conducted in order to
investigate the robot acceptance among Iranian people.
Further, in order to analyze the gathered information, a new
robot acceptance model based on the famous Technology
Acceptance Model (TAM) [10] is proposed. To the best of
authors' knowledge, this is the first research work in which the
subject matter studied in Iran. We believe that the outcome of
this research, in addition to be useful as a first step towards
considering the issue within Iranian community, could be
leveraged as yet another current state report of robot
acceptance. Such information will come in handy in order to
draw the portrait of robot acceptance and adoption in the
world-wide scale. Doing so, the study is presented as in the
following organization: The related works are studied in the
section 2. The underlying motivation of the present work is
978-1-5386-5706-5/18 /$31.00 ©2018 IEEE

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discussed in the section 3. The leveraged method and
experimental results are presented in section 4 and 5,
respectively. Finally, the results of the survey are analyzed and
discussed in the section 6.
II. R
ELATED
W
ORKS
Due to importance of the topic, many research studies have
been conducted to investigate different aspects of robots
acceptance and adoption by human users. To name some, the
following could be mentioned:
In [11], the effects of media, especially Hollywood-made
movies- on users' perception of robots and their adoption
intensions are studied. The results of the survey conducted by
the authors show that, in general, positive media portrayals of
robots will lower the anxiety towards them. Also, recalling
robots with human-like appearance can shape a positive
attitude for users. As another study targeting robot acceptance
by elderlies, the authors in [12], the effect of robot’s social
abilities is studied. The results present that participants felt
more comfort with more communicative robots. This implies
that they may accept such robots as conversational buddies.
An important application context for (social) robots is
employing them as home robots. In this regard, studying
acceptance and adoption issues in this area of interest has
gained remarkable attentions among researches. For example,
the authors in [13] investigated the robot adoption issue by
households. Doing so, they conducted a six-month long real-
world experiment to observe adoption process of Roomba
robot by nine individuals. They found seven key factors that
can affect adoption process, including practical utility, social
influence and economic utility. With the aim of investigating
how peoples' perceptions and experiences may be evolved
over long term encounters, the researchers conducted a six-
month study in [14]. Same authors, to collect their findings on
the topic, published another article to represent insights from a
user's point of view [15].
As another study in this regard, the survey conducted in
[16] was aimed to identify demographics and usage trends of
participants in the case of Roomba robot adoption. The effect
of some personal characteristics including: age, gender,
education and computer experience were explored in [17].
One famous model that most of studies follow its patterns in
order to consider robot acceptance and adoption is TAM. The
research work performed in [18] proposed an extended TAM
for human-robot cooperation in production system. To name
some other interesting works followings are noticeable:
Measuring impact of some human-like features of social
robots on user acceptance in [19], introducing a robot
acceptance model based on TAM in [20] and acceptance
evaluation of human-robot interaction in public places [21].
III. M
OTIVATION
As mentioned earlier, there are many studies in the
literature to consider robot acceptance and adoption issue.
These research works, also targeting different communities
and countries [22-26]. In fact, due to cultural, demographical
and technology penetration ratio in different societies, in most
of cases, conducting same experiment in different context
provides far different results. In this regard, such results are
not generalizable for different cases, in general, in order to
make important decisions. For this reason, and since to our
knowledge there is not performed such a study in the context
of Iranian community; in this paper an acceptance evaluation
experiment has been conducted. Importance of such a study
lays in the fact that Iranian robotic researchers and teams are
among of top ones in the world competitions. However, it is
rarely seen that a social robot employed in a real world
applications within the country. To fill this vast and
meaningful gap, results of such experiments can be priceless.
The work reported in this paper, as the first, limited step in
this way can provide some useful information and insights for
the future studies both in the context of Iranian adopters and
for sake of world-wide comparisons.
IV. M
ETHOD
Similar to most of the researches in this field, this
experiment is also a survey-based one. Doing so, we
conducted a survey on 40 randomly selected individuals. The
participants were asked to answer five questions (based on the
proposed acceptance model) as in the followings.
The questions were designed in such a way that firstly
identify what the participant think about the robots in general.
In fact, answer to this question can illustrate the big picture of
the individual's perception of robots as a base for answering
other questions. The second question directly explores the
acceptance of robots by the participants and their thoughts
about that. Following these key questions, participants were
asked to express their concerns about employing robots and
their preferences on application domain and type of the
interested robots. Fig.1. illustrates a schematic representation
of the experiment model.
Fig. 1. Schematic representation of CRAM

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Fig. 2. Sample survey form
The introduced model, that entitled CRAM (concept-based
robot acceptance model), is developed based on TAM and its
aim is to evaluate robot (or any other technology) acceptance
according to the underlying concepts about the subject that
shaped the person’s mind. In other words, the main source(s)
of the individuals’ attitude and perception towards the
technology, i.e. robot, can be investigated through employing
this model. The rest of the paper is devoted to describe details
of the experiments and analyzing the results.
V. E
XPERIMENT
S
UMMARY
In this experiment, 40 randomly-selected individuals asked
to answer to five questions (Fig. 2.). The summary of
participants’ information is as in the Table 1. In the first
question, individuals asked to express some (up to five) initial
concepts that they think of about robot. Regarding synonyms,
some 19 different keywords (concepts) are collected. Such
concepts are represented in the Fig. 3. All the concepts
alongside with their frequency number are as in the Table. 2.
In response to the second question, 33 out of 40 participants
tell that a robot can be considered as an assistant at home or
work. The main reasons of pros and cans are summarized in
the Table 3. For the third question, only four participants
expressed they have no concern about robots and rest of them
introduced some concerns that are classified as in Fig. 4.
Among the answers, concerns of robots’ misbehavior and
interaction issue (including being emotionless and unsocial)
are more frequent. Responses to the questions 3 and 4 are
illustrated as in the Fig. 5 and 6, respectively.
Table 1. Summary of participants’ information
Fig. 3. Word cloud of presented concepts
VI. D
ISCUSSIO N
Besides the summary provided in the previous section, the
analysis of the responses revealed some interesting facts that
can demystify the current acceptance state of the studied
community.
The most important of such discovered facts are as follows:
• Answers of the participants who were an expert in the
field of robotics, mainly oriented around scientific
and technical issues and concerns, such as
maintenance costs and breakdown issues.
• According to the expressed concepts, the experts are
less affected by the movies (27%) than others (34%);
however, the difference is not so meaningful.
• Again for the experts, they have more tendency
towards humanoids as about 63% against 31% for
others.
• Both the experts and non-experts introduced the
tendency to employ robots out of borders of home.
Specifically, robots at work have more pros than
other applications.
• The individuals without related education (computer,
electrical and IT engineering) are mainly concerned
about robot misbehavior (33%) and being injured by
robots (53%).
• The participants who preferred humanoids are
concerned about robot interaction issue. Moreover,
they often think of robots as alternative to humans for
doing some tasks.
• Those who have not accepted robots as assistant are
mainly affected by movies and robophobia. They are
concerned by extinction of humans and dominance of
machines.
Table 2. The introduced concepts and their frequency
RoboCup (15) Movie (13) Humanoid
(11)
Automation
(11)
Assistant
(8)
Emotionless
(8) AI (7) Artifact (6) Technology
(5) Home (5)
Research (5) IronMan
(4) Expedite (4) Toy (4) War (4)
Rescue (4) Accuracy
(3) Future (3) Talking (2) ---
Gender Education Being
Expert
Age
Female Male Related Unrelated Yes No Min. Max.
6 34 25 15 11 29 17 40

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Table 3. Summary of responses to question no.2
Count Reasons
Yes
33
Accuracy, Ease of work, Automation, Impartialness
No
7
Interaction issue, Personal preference, Misbehavior, Technical
issue, Laziness of humans
Fig. 4. Taxonomy of concerns introduced by the participants
Taking a closer look at the above analysis, some key
influential factors about robot acceptance will be revealed.
• The media and specifically movies play an important
role in shaping humans’ thought and perception of
robots. So, it can be regarded as an important and
working means to educate humans of what are robots
essentially and how they can help humans.
• Having more information about technology and
robots will affect the perception and make acceptance
easier.
• Interaction and social issues are of most important
concerns of the participants. In this regard, they have
a meaningful tendency towards humanoid because
their human-like appearances provide users with
more comfort.
• Lack of trust and dubious efficiency of robots caused
the participants reluctant to use them in their home.
• On the other side, they think such machines could
help them at work.
Fig. 5. Frequency of answer to "where to employ robots?"
Fig. 6. Frequency of answer to "what type of robots?"
According to the gathered information, it can be inferred
that lack of adequate knowledge about robots is one of the
most influential factors that affected the acceptance level.
On the other side, due to achievements of Iranian RoboCup
teams, a remarkable number of participants used to recall them
as realization of robotics. This implies that public media,
through which peoples get informed of the competitions, can
play an important role to shed light on the way of robot
acceptance.
Last but not least, the major concerns of the participants on
inefficiency of robots are related to their insufficient
knowledge of robotics or misguided ones by movies.
VII. C
ONCLUSION AND
F
UTURE
W
ORKS
In this paper the important topic of robot acceptance was
considered. As an influential criterion, technology acceptance
models could be leveraged in order to finding out how a
technology may be used by users, what challenges are in this
way, etc. In this regard, the survival and continuous
development of a technology strongly related to such studies.
In the case of robots, since they are thought to be used in a
close relationship with humans, the acceptance evaluation
studies are of high importance. For this reason, over the years,

25
many research works have been done on different aspects of
the topic and in different contexts and communities. Following
this trend, in this paper the first acceptance evaluation study in
the context of an Iranian community has been conducted.
Moreover, a novel acceptance mode, CRAM, was introduced.
As the future work and in order to provide a broader view of
the robot acceptance among Iranians, a comprehensive
acceptance devaluation study will be conducted. Moreover, to
provide a roadmap for such activities, a comprehensive survey
with the aim of organizing the respected literature will be
performed.
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