Semi-Ethnographic Study on Human Responses to a Help-Seeker Robot

This video presents how people responded to a robot asking for help at six cafes at the Oregon State University campus. Each cafe was visited twice over eight weeks between August and September 2019, always around lunchtime for a two-hour period. Many participants expressed their delight at the presence of the robot, as seen in their help and care behaviors, and communications with each other. The wizarded mobile robot, called a ChairBot, had a whiteboard indicating its current ordering request, as well as a money clip for payment. We conducted fly-on-the-wall observations, participant interviews, and grounded coding to understand why and how people helped the robot. People helped the robot because: (1) they were curious, (2) they wanted to help the people behind the robot, and (3) they wanted to be perceived as ethical. The video shows these interactions in context, with diverse human-robot communication strategies and unexpected emergent behaviors that illustrate the value of in-the-wild studies.