Workers expect basic social skills but limited autonomy from future robots - a qualitative interview study and...

Research has shown that robots are perceived negatively when they are less socially skilled or more autonomous than users expect them to be. However, little is known about worker expectations of robot social skills and autonomy as developments in the field have been mostly guided by technological progress without addressing future users' perspectives. Building on the literature on social skills for robots and humans, we propose a taxonomy for robot social skills and investigate the extent to which this taxonomy is reflected in employees' expectations of social robots in a qualitative interview study of 20 workers from the hospitality, manufacturing, and care industries. Our results show that workers are able to provide specific preferences when discussing future robot use in their workplace. We argue that some basic robot social skills can be broadly implemented and derive a provisional set of technical requirements. Results also suggest that a robot's degree of autonomy needs to be finely tuned to the context and its task.