Social Robots for Socio-Physical Distancing.

This paper presents two survey studies conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) to explore the possible uses of the desktop social robot Haru during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first study aimed to understand participants' preferences for Haru's use to support remote communication with others. We found, however, that participants imagined the robot playing a much larger role in their everyday life, even living as their social companion through the uncertainty and disruption caused by COVID-19. This led us to conduct a second AMT study to further explore how participants imagined their life with Haru, and how these imaginaries related to their socio-physical distancing [SPD] practices and their perception of Haru's use for following SPD or overcoming disruption from such distancing. Our findings present of how participants imagined Haru to help them through SPD for uses beyond remote communication and suggest how these uses map on to and extend our broader understanding of social support and companionship with robots.