Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot

© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe

Which activities threaten independent living of elderly when becoming problematic : inspiration for meaningful service robot functionality

Purpose: In light of the increasing elderly population and the growing demand for home care, the potential of robot support is given increasing attention. In this paper, an inventory of activities was made that threaten independent living of elderly when becoming problematic. Results will guide the further development of an existing service robot, the Care-O-bot®. Method: A systematic literature search of PubMed was performed, focused on the risk factors for institutionalization. Additionally, focus group sessions were conducted in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and France. In these focus group sessions, problematic activities threatening the independence of elderly people were discussed. Three separate target groups were included in the focus group sessions: (1) elderly persons (n = 41), (2) formal caregivers (n = 40) and (3) informal caregivers (n = 32). Results: Activities within the International Classification of Functioning domains mobility, self-care, and interpersonal interaction and relationships were found to be the most problematic. Conclusions: A distinct set of daily activities was identified that may threaten independent living, but no single activity could be selected as the main activity causing a loss of independence as it is often a combination of problematic activities that is person-specific. Supporting the problematic activities need not involve a robotic solution Read More: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/17483107.2013.840861Peer reviewe

Evaluating the Robot Personality and Verbal Behavior of Domestic Robots Using Video-Based Studies

Walters ML, Lohse M, Hanheide M, et al. Evaluating the Robot Personality and Verbal Behavior of Domestic Robots Using Video-Based Studies. Advanced Robotics. 2011;25(18):2233-2254.Robots are increasingly being used in domestic environments and should be able to interact with inexperienced users. Human-human interaction and human-computer interaction research findings are relevant, but often limited because robots are different from both humans and computers. Therefore, new human-robot interaction (HRI) research methods can inform the design of robots suitable for inexperienced users. A video-based HRI (VHRI) methodology was here used to carry out a multi-national HRI user study for the prototype domestic robot BIRON (BIelefeld RObot companioN). Previously, the VHRI methodology was used in constrained HRI situations, while in this study HRIs involved a series of events as part of a 'home-tour' scenario. Thus, the present work is the first study of this methodology in extended HRI contexts with a multi-national approach. Participants watched videos of the robot interacting with a human actor and rated two robot behaviors (Extrovert and Introvert). Participants' perceptions and ratings of the robot's behaviors differed with regard to both verbal interactions and person following by the robot. The study also confirms that the VHRI methodology provides a valuable means to obtain early user feedback, even before fully working prototypes are available. This can usefully guide the future design work on robots, and associated verbal and non-verbal behaviors. (C) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden and The Robotics Society of Japan, 201