Influences of concerns toward emotional interaction into social acceptability of robots

It is widely believed that there will be social robots in the future working in our daily life, and researchers have started to study human-robot interaction. It seems that ordinary people in many industrialized countries are waiting for such robots; Japan is believed to be one such country. Researchers in robotics have already started to develop various technologies toward such robots. Meanwhile, researchers wonder what kind of robots might be accepted. One intuitive dimension is concerned with immediate acceptance, including field trials, observational studies for a real use-case with robots in our daily lives, and marketing surveys asking people about functions and prices of a possible product. Moreover, laboratory studies with a real robot in a use-case scenario of a near future can contribute to predicting human behaviors in facing robots which not yet exist.