Factors of Trust for Successfully Adopting Social Robots on the Campus

Social robots are making their way into different everyday use cases. Their adoption depends on getting many factors right. In this paper, we investigate the obstacles we might face when introducing social robots on the campus. In particular, we focus on trust, which is a crucial requirement between robots and humans. We collected data using questionnaires and interviews, and our analysis yields a set of factors of users’ trust that may affect the future adoption of social robots, a set of use-cases for social robots on campus and their associated user expectations. Adapting an established model of trust, we highlight operational and operator transparency as keys for gaining users’ trust in on-campus social robots. Our work contributes to the literature by providing practical considerations for setting up social robots for success on campuses.