In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments

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The advances of technologies for mobile robotics enable the application of robots to increasingly complex tasks. Cleaning office buildings on a daily basis is a problem that could be partially automatized with a cleaning robot that assists the cleaning professional yielding a higher cleaning capacity. A typical task in this domain is the selective cleaning, that is a focused cleaning effort to dirty spots, which speeds up the overall cleaning procedure significantly. To enable a robotic cleaner to accomplish this task, it is first necessary to distinguish dirty areas from the clean remainder. This paper discusses a vision-based dirt detection system for mobile cleaning robots that can be applied to any surface and dirt without previous training, that is fast enough to be executed on a mobile robot and which achieves high dirt recognition rates of 90% at an acceptable false positive rate of 45%. The paper also introduces a large database of real scenes which was used for the evaluation and is publicly available

In this paper Care-O-bot ® 3 is introduced, which is designed as a prototype for a household robot. In contrast to merely technology driven service robot developments, many considerations on embodiment were conducted. In particular, Care-O-bot ® 3 excels in its user-interaction oriented design. Nevertheless, it is equipped with leading edge technology, which is highly integrated into a very compact form. This convergence of design and technology accounts for the idea of Care-O-bot ® 3 being a product vision for a robot butler. KeywordsDomestic robot design, convergence of design and technology, robot butler.