Observing people interacting with a mobile robot in their own homes
What is it about?
We investigated several aspects of navigating together with a mobile robot platform in domestic environments with seven study subjects in their own homes. This gave us the opportunity to observe how people move together with a robot through narrow passages, how they present their personal environment to a service robot, and how they in some cases handled specific (problematic) situations. We also observed, how well a contemporary general purpose robotic platform could cope with average apartment layouts, carpets, thresholds, furniture, and typical "clutter" occurring in typical family homes.
Why is it important?
At that time, it was one of the first exploratory studies that took the robot out of the lab (literally!) and brought it to environments we assumed being realistic scenarios for the "general purpose personal service robot" many works tried to work towards. The study also adhered to the paradigm of semi-controlled experiments, it followed some setup and general instructions, but the interaction was not scripted, our subjects could decide freely, how to do things, which gave some inspiration for further investigations.