How Many Robots Do You Want? A Cross-Cultural Exploration on User Preference and Perception of an Assistive Multi-Robot System

There has been increased development of assistive robots for the home, along with empirical studies assessing cultural differences on user perception. However, little attention has been paid to cultural differences with respect to non- humanoid, multi-robot interactions in homes or otherwise. In this exploratory paper, we investigate how cultural differences may impact users’ preferences and perceived usefulness of a multi-robot system by creating an interactive online survey and considering variables often absent in HRI studies. We introduce our multi-robot design and survey construction, and report results evaluated across 191 young adult participants from China, India, and the USA. We find significant effects of culture on both participants’ preferences and perceived usefulness of the system between India and China or the USA, but not between China and the USA. We also find effects of culture on perceived usefulness to be partially mediated by participant preferences. Our findings reinforce the importance of considering cultural differences in designing domestic multi-robotic assistants.