The Art of Gate-Crashing Bringing HRI into users' homes

Special purpose service robots have already entered the market and their users homes. Also the idea of the general purpose service robot or personal robot companion is increasingly discussed and investigated. To probe human-robot interaction with a mobile robot in arbitrary domestic settings, we conducted a study in eight different homes. Based on previous results from laboratory studies we identified particular interaction situations which should be studied thoroughly in real home settings. Based upon the collected sensory data from the robot we found that the different environments influenced the spatial management observable during our subjects' interaction with the robot. We also validated empirically that the concept of spatial prompting can aid spatial management and communication, and assume this concept to be helpful for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) design. In this article we report on our exploratory field study and our findings regarding, in particular, the spatial management observed during show episodes and movement through narrow passages

Interaction awareness for joint environment exploration

An important goal for research on service robots is the cooperation of a human and a robot as team. A service robot in a domestic environment needs to build a representation of its future workspace that corresponds to the human user's understanding of these surroundings. But it also needs to apply this model about the "where" and "what" in its current interaction to allow communication about objects and places in a human-adequate way. In this paper we present the integration of a hierarchical robotic mapping system into an interactive framework controlled by a dialog system. The goal is to use interactively acquired environment models to implement a robot with interaction aware behaviors. A major contribution of this work is a three-level hierarchy of spatial representation affecting three different communication dimensions. This hierarchy is consequently applied in the design of the grounding-based dialog, laser-based topological mapping, and an objects attention system. We demonstrate the benefits of this integration for learning and tour guiding in a humancomprehensible interaction between a robot and its user in a home-tour scenario. The enhanced interaction capabilities are crucial for developing a new generation of robots that will be accepted not only as service robots but also as robot companions