What Can We Learn from the Long-Term Users of a Social Robot?

Despite the recent technological advances, long-term experiments with robots have challenges to keep the users interested after the initial excitement disappears. This paper explores the user expectations by analyzing the long-term owners of Sony AIBO who have been using these robots for years (heavy users). 78 participants filled an on-line questionnaire and their answers were inspected to discover the key needs of this user group. Quantitative and textual methods confirmed that the most-wanted skills were the interaction with humans and the autonomous operation. The integration with the AI agents and Internet services was important, but the long-term memory and learning capabilities were not that relevant for the participants as expected. The diverse preferences between robot skills led to the creation of a prioritized recommendation list to complement the design guidelines for social robots in the literature.