We describe an engaging interactive robot and the workflow design for incorporating such service robots in health care. The research is analyzing the long term usability of automated medication support for older people as they interact with a Stationary Robotic Medication Management System (StRoMMS). It delivers timely instructions and automated guidance as people take their daily medications in their independent living quarters in a retirement village. A pilot user study evaluated the hypothesized technological requirements of the robotic system and the clinical workflow requirements in the healthcare context. The novel contributions are our interactive robot and the workflow design. Following a “system of systems” design approach we determined that robots cannot work in isolation in a complex operational space such as healthcare. The value of introducing interactive robots in healthcare can be realized when the robot has interfaces with the healthcare system, which enhance the overall outcome and experience of the patient. Our research will inform the research community of the importance of the confluence of people, workflows and tools while designing healthcare robotics technology.

Service robots for personal and domestic use are increasingly gaining momentum. Easy and efficient programming of such robots is an enormous research and commercial space that is beginning to be explored. In this paper, we present RoboStudio, a Visual Programming Environment (VPE) to program the interactive behavior of personal service robots. RoboStudio lies at the intersection of VPEs which aid in authoring the robot user interface and control logic. A novel contribution of this work is that it advances the research in authoring service applications on robotic platforms, specially for researchers who do development in decentralized multidisciplinary teams and validate their research goals through field trials. Furthermore, service robot programming environments is a novel area of research, particularly when it comes to expressing what the robot does in a declarative syntax.

As part of our long term research interests in examining the technological requirements for a shopping mall robot, we performed a short pilot study during the Christmas holidays to identify the social interaction dynamics for Neel, a wheeled mobile robot which interacts using its on-site and online presence. During the pilot study we found that a range of the robot's interaction capabilities were mostly unused due to the relatively short interactions users had with the robot to fulfill their informational requirements like the movie show-times or apparel deals. Since, its challenging to educate and inform a diverse mass of users about the robot's functionality, we decided to divide the research roadmap in stages where in the first stage the users would learn the value of the robot's capabilities by the repeated short-time interactions and over the long term more users would register for the robot's services. Hence, identifying the temporal and episodic characteristics of the interactions are perceived important to match the expectations and privacy concerns of the users. We also identified that while non-interactively delivering shopping related information through a web application is relatively easier, doing it actively through the robot can be probed as advertisements very easily by human participants and negate the user experience we try to deliver. We report some key technological advances we made through our field trial and set forth the goals.

The 2011 HRI Pioneers Workshop will be conducted in conjunction with the 2011 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The 2011 HRI Pioneers Workshop will provide a forum for graduate students and postdocs to learn about the current state of HRI, to present their work and to network with one another and with select senior researchers in a setting that is less formal and more interactive than the main conference. Workshop participants will discuss important issues and open challenges in the field, encouraging the formation of collaborative relationships across disciplines and geographic boundaries.

The project Myneel and its portal myneel.com together were envisaged to provide us with crucial insights into the commercialization of service robots. In this paper we describe our system and propose an approach to develop an interactive conversational agent which can serve shopping needs of the visitors in a shopping mall.

Although existing robotic systems are interesting to interact with in the short term, it has been shown that after some weeks of quasi-regular encounters, humans gradually lose their interest, and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships are not established. An underlying hypothesis driving the proposed project is that such relationships can be significantly enhanced if the human and the robot are gradually creating a pool of shared episodic memories that they can co-refer to, and if they are both embedded in a social web of other humans and robots they both know and encounter frequently. Thus, here we propose to use Facebook, a highly successful online networking resource for humans, towards enhancing longer-term human-robot relationships, by helping to address the above two prerequisites. As a starting point, we utilize social information in order to personalize human-robot dialogues, and to include references to past encounters and to encounters with friends within dialogues. A robot equipped with a modular software architecture (with IPC-intercommunicating modules for face recognition, a simple dialog system, a navigation subsystem, and a real-time Facebook connection/local social database) has been deployed, and is encountering humans in the environment of our lab. An early demonstration of a basic form of such encounters is shown in the submitted video. The system is expected to achieve two significant novelties: arguably being one of the first robots to be embedded in a social web, and being the first robot that can purposefully exploit and create social information that is available online. Furthermore, it is expected to provide empirical support for our main driving hypothesis, that the formation of shared episodic memories within a social web can lead to more meaningful long-term human-robot relationships.

Our project aims at supporting the creation of sustainable and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships through the creation of embodied robots with face recognition and natural language dialogue capabilities, which exploit and publish social information available on the web (Facebook). Our main underlying experimental hypothesis is that such relationships can be significantly enhanced if the human and the robot are gradually creating a pool of shared episodic memories that they can co-refer to (shared memories), and if they are both embedded in a social web of other humans and robots they both know and encounter (shared friends). In this paper, we are presenting such a robot, which as we will see achieves two significant novelties.