A Social Robot in a Human-Animal Relationship at Home: A Field Study

Pets are humanity'V?stra G?talands oldest friend since ancient times. People have been living with them since then, and the relationship between people and pets as family members at home is well researched. Recently, social robots are entering family lives, and a new research field is being born, namely, a triad relationship between people, pets, and social robots. To investigate how a social robot affects a human-animal relationship in the home, an exploratory field experiment was conducted. In this experiment, a robot, called NAO, was introduced into the homes of 10 families, and 22 participants (with 12 pets:4 dogs and 8 cats), called 'owners' hereafter, were asked to interact with NAO. NAO was operated under two conditions:speaking positively to the pets, and speaking negatively to them. Just five sentenses that NAO spoke to the pets and two sentenses to the owners were different. The results of the study show that changing NAO's attitude to the pets affected both the owners? impression of the robot and the pet's impression of the robot (perceived by the owners).