My Roomba is Rambo

[RoboGuy]

An APstory reports on a new study about Human-Robot attachment thatfocused on the iRobot Roomba. Likeprevious studies, it found owners became deeply attached to theirrobots, named them, treated them like trusted pets, and worried ifthe robots got into trouble. This is interesting in thecase of Roomba because, in the end, it doesn't really work very well asa vacuum cleaner. It seems the message for industrial designers isthat consumers will accept problems, failures, and generalunreliability in products, provided an emotional bond can be formedbetween the product and the owner. (couldn't the owner of any exoticforeign sports car have told them that?) The researchers also noted thatrobotics had done more toincrease male participation in the chore of vacuuming the house than 40years of women's liberation. The research was done by Beki Grinter andothers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Their finding werereported in a research paper titled, "My Roomba is Rambo":Intimate Home Appliances (PDF format). For more see our previousstories about a similarNSF report and a UKstudy in which psychologists place robots into homes to studyHuman-Robot interactions.

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