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Drone technologies represent a new category of mobile devices that are increasingly present in public spaces. They are becoming increasingly autonomous, featuring a wide range of capabilities from detecting objects to monitoring situations. Yet, little is known about the characteristics that influence their acceptability in public spaces. In this work, we investigate how people’s attitude towards drone capabilities is influenced by the context in which they are operating. We present three user studies: first, a participatory design study (N=5) in which we investigated people’s expectations towards drone capabilities and contexts of use; second, a pre-study (N=18) performed to select 6 contexts of use for public drones with three different severity levels; and third, a survey-based study (N=26) where we evaluated people’s attitude towards 10 drone capabilities in 6 contexts of varying severity levels. Our results demonstrate that people’s attitude towards drone capabilities is more positive for severe contexts. In addition, we found positive correlations for all capabilities between attitude and perceived severity of context. This work contributes to the design of context-sensitive human-drone interactions and to the future integration of public drones.
Herdel et al. (Mon,) studied this question.