User-Centered Design of a Dynamic-Autonomy Remote Interaction Concept for Manipulation-Capable Robots to Assist Elderly People in the Home

Abstract

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

Human-Robot Interaction for Semi-Autonomous Assistive Robots : Empirical Studies and an Interaction Concept for Supporting Elderly People at Home

“…Results (Figure 4; Mast et al, 2012) showed substantial differences between robot services in their rated usefulness. For many items, participants' responses were heterogeneous, which is reflected in the large confidence intervals in Figure 4.…”

“…. Demands for robot services of elderly people and informal caregivers (means and 95% confidence intervals) sorted by demand of elderly people; 5-point rating scale from "not useful at all" (-2) to "very useful" (+2); asterisks denote statistically significant differences between mean ratings of user groups (* at 0.05 level, *** at 0.001 level); from Mast et al (2012) …”

“…. Two contrasting workspaces: large office desk with multi-screen setup as found in the home emergency centers (left); small workspace at the telemedical institution (right); from Mast et al (2012) 3 Understanding User…”

“…a b c d Figure 10. User interface for elderly people: a) main menu; b) robot services menu; c) access to object and destination selection; d) object selection (similar in Mast et al, 2012;and Mast, Burmester, et al, 2014, in press) …”

Mission-Oriented Heterogeneous Robot Cooperation Based on Smart Resources Execution

“…Therefore, object perception, affordance analysis and manipulation strategies are forming a critical chain of tasks for service robot performance [80]. In [111] a clear example of the practical application of these techniques is addressed.…”