Don't Bother Me: Users' Reactions to Different Robot Disturbing Behaviors

When living together in a household with a socially assistive robot, it can happen that the robot disturbs its owner by offering a service. One might argue that a social robot should act according to the social norms people expect of each other, but still then disturbances of daily routines are a challenging endeavor to address. We conducted a preliminary user study in which we explored four different disturbing behaviors the socially assistive robot HOBBIT showed, while the user was focusing on a different primary task. We used the BEHAVE measurement set to evaluate the attitudinal and behavioral responses of the users, which disturbance distracted the user the most from his/her primary task and how the disturbance affected the overall attitudinal response towards the robot. Interestingly, our results showed that the disturbing behavior did not heavily negatively impact the assessment of the robot and that not all types of disturbance did distract the users with the same intensity.