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Despite advances in areas such as the personalization of robots, sustaining adoption of robots for long-term use in families remains a challenge. Recent studies have identified integrating robots into families’ routines and rituals as a promising approach to support long-term adoption. However, few studies explored the integration of robots into family routines and there is a gap in systematic measures to capture family preferences for robot integration. Building upon existing routine inventories, we developed Family-Robot Routines Inventory (FRRI), with 24 family routines and 24 child routine items, to capture parents’ attitudes toward and expectations from the integration of robotic technology into their family routines. Using this inventory, we collected data from 150 parents through an online survey. Our analysis indicates that parents had varying perceptions for the utility of integrating robots into their routines. For example, parents found robot integration to be more helpful in children’s individual routines, than to the collective routines of their families. We discuss the design implications of these preliminary findings, and how they may serve as a first step toward understanding the diverse challenges and demands of designing and integrating household robots for families.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available August 26, 2025
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Despite advances in areas such as the personalization of robots, sustaining adoption of robots for long-term use in families remains a challenge. Recent studies have identified integrating robots into families’ routines and rituals as a promising approach to support long-term adoption. However, few studies explored the integration of robots into family routines and there is a gap in systematic measures to capture family preferences for robot integration. Building upon existing routine inventories, we developed Family-Robot Routines Inventory (FRRI), with 24 family routines and 24 child routine items, to capture parents’ attitudes toward and expectations from the integration of robotic technology into their family routines. Using this inventory, we collected data from 150 parents through an online survey. Our analysis indicates that parents had varying perceptions for the utility of integrating robots into their routines. For example, parents found robot integration to be more helpful in children’s individual routines, than to the collective routines of their families. We discuss the design implications of these preliminary findings, and how they may serve as a first step toward understanding the diverse challenges and demands of designing and integrating household robots for families.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available August 26, 2025
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Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children’s learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots into their children’s learning activities. We developed prototype capabilities for a learning companion robot to deliver educational prompts and responses to parent-child pairs during reading sessions and conducted in-home user studies involving 10 families with children aged 3–5. Our data indicates that parents want to work with robots as collaborators to augment parental activities to foster children’s learning, introducing the notion of parent-robot collaboration. Our findings offer an empirical understanding of the needs and challenges of parent-child interaction in informal learning scenarios and design opportunities for integrating a companion robot into these interactions. We offer insights into how robots might be designed to facilitate parent-robot collaboration, including parenting policies, collaboration patterns, and interaction paradigms.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available May 11, 2025
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As robotic products become more integrated into daily life, there is a greater need to understand authentic and real-world human-robot interactions to inform product design. Across many domestic, educational, and public settings, robots interact with not only individuals and groups of users, but also families, including children, parents, relatives, and even pets. However, products developed to date and research in human-robot and child-robot interactions have focused on the interaction with their primary users, neglecting the complex and multifaceted interactions between family members and with the robot. There is a significant gap in knowledge, methods, and theories for how to design robots to support these interactions. To inform the design of robots that can support and enhance family life, this paper provides (1) a narrative review exemplifying the research gap and opportunities for family-robot interactions and (2) an actionable family-centered framework for research and practices in human-robot and child-robot interaction.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available March 11, 2025
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Technical and practical challenges in human-robot interaction (HRI) research often involve facilitating sustained long-term interactions, fostering engagement with multiple individuals, and taking place in-the-wild. The home environment embodies all three challenges, as multiple family members regularly engage with technology at home. In our research, we take a family-centered approach to understand, design, and evaluate how social robots can take part in setting and maintaining family routines to support long-term HRI. In our prior work, we conducted participatory design sessions with children and families to understand their preferences for having social robots in their home. We then designed interactions for robot-facilitated routines. Finally, our future work will include field studies investigating how robot-facilitated routines can support long-term engagement in family-robot interactions and facilitate connections.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available March 11, 2025