Cognitive, Social, Sociable or just Socially Acceptable Robots?

Today there is a large movement towards creating social and cognitive robots. Today there is research aiming at using robots as care support as well as social agents introduced in geriatric care and home care. Much of the research is aimed at the development of cognitive and social agents, since robot agents are considered to need ways of interacting with the people in the surrounding areas. In this perspective it is necessary to start thinking of robots not only in terms of social, cognitive or sociable, but also of socially acceptable. What are the requirements for a socially acceptable robot, and which properties in a robot provide for making it more or less acceptable as part of a social environment? In this paper a set of tentative acceptance properties is presented, together with the results from a pilot study trying to assess the importance of some of these properties for the social acceptance of domestic service robots.