My series of Human-Robot Interaction household studies within the project SharedSpace started in February this year. Originally, it was intended as a companion to similar long-term studies performed with vacuum cleaning robots. I was curious to find out how adoption patterns differ between a functional robot and an entertainment robot, such as Anki Vector.
However, COVID-19 and the related shut-down in Austria affected our data collection and clearly the comparability of our data. Anyways, we continued our efforts and performed household visit #4 as virtual meeting and added some COVID-19 related questions. It will give interesting insights if people used the robot more (e.g. because they have more time with it at home) or less (e.g. because there are more prominent topics in everyday-life now than playing with an entertainment robot).