Exploring home robot capabilities by medium fidelity prototyping

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of medium fidelity prototyping to test new interactive capabilities for home robots, focusing on activity recognition, intention understanding, and transparent behavior to enhance user support.

Contribution

It introduces an exploratory prototyping approach to evaluate and inform the design of intelligent, user-friendly home robot capabilities.

Findings

Prototyping revealed key interaction challenges and opportunities.

Insights into activity and intention recognition in home environments.

Guidelines for designing transparent and adaptive robot behaviors.

Abstract

In order for autonomous robots to be able to support people's well-being in homes and everyday environments, new interactive capabilities will be required, as exemplified by the soft design used for Disney's recent robot character Baymax in popular fiction. Home robots will be required to be easy to interact with and intelligent--adaptive, fun, unobtrusive and involving little effort to power and maintain--and capable of carrying out useful tasks both on an everyday level and during emergencies. The current article adopts an exploratory medium fidelity prototyping approach for testing some new robotic capabilities in regard to recognizing people's activities and intentions and behaving in a way which is transparent to people. Results are discussed with the aim of informing next designs.