Iterative User-Centric Development of Mobile Robotic Systems with Intuitive Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction in a Clinic Environment

Abstract

Deploying robots with the ability to autonomously navigate in the environment of a clinic necessitates carefully designing their verbal and non-verbal behaviour in order to avoid irritating, worrying or even endangering users, bystanders and passersby. We describe a user-centred approach used to design, implement and evaluate an interaction concept for mobile robotic assistants for a clinic environment, resulting in two robotic assistant prototypes and a generalized multimodal interaction framework applicable to a variety of autonomously navigating robotic agents. We present the steps of the design process and intermediate findings, the final system components and experiment results showing good acceptance of the interaction concept. A clip of the two robots in action can be found under https://short.dfki.de/ro-man.