Design principles for robot inclusive spaces: A case study with Roomba

Abstract

Abstract-Research focus on service robots that deals with applications related to healthcare, logistics, residential, search and rescue are gaining significant momentum in the recent years. Their social and economic relevance is more than evident. Yet, while much has been researched about "designing robots" focusing on sensing, actuation, mobility and control of service robots, little work has been done on "design for robots" that looks at designing preferred artefacts or environments for such robots. In this work, we propose a new philosophy of robot inclusive spaces, a cross disciplinary approach that brings together roboticians, architects and designers to solve numerous unsettled research problems in robotics community through design of inclusive interior spaces for robots where the latter live and operate. With a residential floor cleaning robot as a case study, we inductively derived a set of four design principles namely observability, accessibility, activity and safety that guides the realization of an inclusive space for these service robots. Also, the suggested principles are further defined, analysed and validated for their merits in this paper.

Toward a framework for robot-inclusive environments

“…Recently Mohan et al proposed a new design perspective, called robot-inclusive space design, to designing interior space for service robots [38,39], which suggests a "design for robot" approach to complement the conventional "designing robot" approach with an objective of overcoming the multiple research challenges identified by roboticists. The approach suggests designing and adapting spaces and its component variables such as lighting, furniture, flooring, doors, and walls to be suitable for the deployment of robots, a perspective that departs from the usual approach of optimizing the components technologies such as perception, action, and cognition without any inclusive adaptations to the operating environments.…”

“…The approach suggests designing and adapting spaces to be suitable for the deployment of robots, a perspective that departs from the usual bottom-up approach followed in robotics where robots must fit the existing environments. The design criteria are observability, accessibility, manipulability, activity, and safety for environments involving sociable robots living and working alongside humans [11,39]. A well designed robot-friendly environment would allow for easy robot perception of obstacles, landmarks and artifacts of interests (observability).…”

“…Feasibility study involving the service robot for specimen delivery task at Singapore based hospital. The robot platform is an Adept PeopleBot [11]. Fig.…”

“…A static environment would be much easier than a dynamic environment for the robot therein. For example, in a manless warehouse, the robot can transport the heavy goods from one storage rack to another autonomously; a robot (e.g., Adept PeopleBot [11]) for specimen delivery in hospital would need additional capabilities like recognition of human or moving objects and obstacle avoidance.…”

Immersive Virtual Environment as a Promising Tool for the Elderly-Friendly Assistive Robot Design

“…To date, some studies have identified a link between robot and environment [14][15][16]. Tan, Mohan [16] has emphasized the importance of five factors of robot-friendly environment, which comprise observability, manipulability, activity, and safety.…”