Public Perspectives on Robot Intervention: Insights from a Low-Supervision Decision Exhibit

This Late Breaking Work presents a low-threshold, unsupervised public exhibit designed to explore how non-expert audiences imagine and negotiate future human–robot interactions in ethically charged everyday situations. The exhibit, installed in Karlsruhe, Germany, invited participants to engage with four dilemma-based scenarios where participants were prompted to decide how a social robot should act confronting questions of moral delegation and machine agency. The activity generated rich, situated reflections on responsibility, safety, care, and the limits of automation. Findings reveal context-dependent expectations that balance efficiency against dignity, human judgment, and relational preservation, shaped by perceived stakes, social context, and the specific embodiment of the robot involved. Through this we demonstrate how minimally supervised participatory formats can surface normative expectations and support inclusive, responsible robot design.