Collaborative Research: HCC: Small: Robot-Rooms: Giving Form to Domestic Activity, On the Go

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This project’s goal is to explore how robotic systems could become deeply integrated into people’s living and working spaces via “robot-rooms”. People are increasingly using technologies such as voice assistants and intelligent thermostats to customize and interact with spaces; the project team’s vision is to use robotic surface technologies they have developed to allow the room itself to change configuration and physically interact with occupants. This scenario may have benefits in a number of contexts: houses that adapt to facilitate family and individual interaction; workspaces that automatically adjust to an individual’s abilities and tasks to make work more comfortable and efficient; hotels and apartments that can adapt to many different visitors in a short time; museum exhibits that provide a wide variety of immersive experiences; and many others. The team plans to implement multiple prototypes to both explore these possibilities and to support outreach activities aimed at encouraging youth to enter robotics-related careers and to raise public awareness of the possibilities of robots in everyday life. In the project, the team will develop: (a) a design space of possibilities for what characterizes a robot-room, informed by human needs and wants; (b) a working prototype, and (c) a deep understanding of how inhabitants are supported and augmented by a robot-room, following real-world scenarios. Specifically, the investigators will conduct a user-experience study to investigate the experiences of participants interacting with prototypes representing two robot-room concepts using rapid prototyping techniques. The results of this study will form the basis for the development of a full-scale robot-room prototype. Ongoing interaction studies will iterate the robot-room prototype through cycles of evaluation with respect to its usability, performance, and efficacy. Ultimately, the robot-rooms investigated in this project will prove an impactful form of robotics as we enter a extend beyond current conceptions of productivity and play, defined by intimate collaborations between people and machines, and a novel paradigm for human-computer interaction in which the interaction is with a machine that physically envelops people.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.