Design Metaphors for Understanding User Expectations of Socially Interactive Robot Embodiments

The physical design of a robot suggests expectations of that robot’s functionality for human users and collaborators. When those expectations align with the robot’s true capabilities, users are more likely to adopt the technologies for their intended use. However, the relationship between expectations and socially interactive robot design is not well understood. This article applies the concept of design metaphors to robot design and contributes the Metaphors for Understanding Functional and Social Anticipated Affordances dataset of 165 extant robots and the expectations users place on them. We used Mechanical Turk to crowd-source user expectation over three user studies. The first study ( N = 382) associated crowd-sourced design metaphors to different robot embodiments. The second study ( N = 803) assessed initial social expectations of robot embodiments. The final study ( N = 805) addressed the degree of abstraction of the design metaphors and the functional expectations projected on robot embodiments. We performed analyses to gain insights into how design metaphors can be used to understand social and functional expectations of robots and how these data can be visualized to be useful for study designers and robot designers. Together, these results can serve to guide robot designers toward aligning user expectations with true robot capabilities, facilitating positive human–robot interaction.