The Interactive Urban Robot: User-centered development and final field trial of a direction requesting robot

Astrid Weiss, Nicole Mirnig, Ulrike Bruckenberger, Ewald Strasser, Manfred Tscheligi, Barbara Kühnlenz, Dirk Wollherr, Bartlomiej Stanczyk

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this article, we present the user-centered development of the service robot IURO. IURO's goal is to find the way to a designated place in town without any previous map knowledge, just by retrieving information from asking pedestrians for directions. We present the 3-years development process,which involved a series of studies on its appearance, communication model, feedback modalities, and social navigation mechanisms. Our main contribution lies within the final field trial.With the autonomous IURO platform, we performed a series of six way-finding runs (over 24 hours of run-time in total) in the city center of Munich, Germany. The robot interacted with approximately 100 pedestrians of which 36 interactions included a full route dialogue. A variety of empirical methods was used to explore reactions of primary users (pedestrians who actually interacted with the robot) and secondary users (bystanders who observed others interacting). The gathered data provides insights into usability, user experience, and acceptance of IURO and allowed us deriving recommendations for the development of other socially interactive robots.

Original languageEnglish
JournalPaladyn
Volume6
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 27 Mar 2015

Keywords

  • autonomous mobile robot
  • Human-robot interaction
  • in-situ evaluation
  • outdoor
  • public place
  • socially interactive robots

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