Studying Drink-Serving Service Robots in the Real World

Field studies where robots are tested in real life settings bring different challenges for researchers, robotics scientists and users. In this paper, we address some of the challenges we encountered when testing two different drink-serving service robots in the wild. We collect challenges from three different experiments. Two experiments were conducted in elderly care facilities, while a third experiment took place in the lobby of a concert hall. We focus on the challenges that researchers face during the preparation phase and the on-set deployment phase when testing robots in the wild. We point to potential difficulties that may arise and present some practical solutions to the issues encountered. Our results suggest that lab studies do not sufficiently prepare the researcher for research ’in the wild.’