Technologists have long wanted to put robots in the home, making robots truly personal and present in every aspect of our lives. It has not been clear, however, exactly what these robots should do in the home. The difficulty of tasking robots with home chores comes not only from the significant technical challenges, but also from the strong emotions and expectations people have about their home lives. In this paper, we explore one possible set of tasks a robot could perform, home organization and storage tasks. Using the technique of need finding, we interviewed a group of people regarding the reality of organization in their home; the successes, failures, family dynamics and practicalities surrounding organization. These interviews are abstracted into a set of frameworks and design implications for home robotics, which we contribute to the community as inspiration and hypotheses for future robot prototypes to test.

Robots often need to ask humans for help, for instance to complete a human component in a larger task or to recover from an unforeseen error. In this paper, we explore how robots can initiate interactions with people in order to ask for help. We discuss a study in which a robot initiated interaction with a participant by producing either an acoustic signal or a verbal greeting. Thereafter, the robot produced a gesture in order to request help in performing a task. We investigate the effect that social framing by means of a verbal greeting may have on people's attention to the robot, on their recognition of the robot's actions and intention, and on their willingness to help. The results show that social framing, in contrast to other methods for getting a person's continued attention, is effective and increases how friendly the robot appears. However, it has little influence on people's willingness to assist the robot, which rather depends on the activities people are engaged in, and on the readability of the robot's request.

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In our field deployments of mobile remote presence (MRP) systems in offices, we observed that remote operators of MRPs often unintentionally spoke too loudly. This disrupted their local co-workers, who happened to be within earshot of the MRP system. To address this issue, we prototyped and empirically evaluated the effect of sidetone to help operators self regulate their speaking loudness. Sidetone is the intentional, attenuated feedback of speakers' voices to their ears while they are using a telecommunication device. In a 3level (no sidetone vs. low sidetone vs. high sidetone) withinparticipants pair of experiments, people interacted with a confederate through an MRP system. The first experiment involved MRP operators using headsets with boom microphones (N=20). The second experiment involved MRP operators using loudspeakers and desktop microphones (N=14). While we detected the effects of the sidetone manipulation in our audio-visual context, the effect was attenuated in comparison to earlier audio-only studies. We hypothesize that the strong visual component of our MRP system interferes with the sidetone effect. We also found that engaging in more social tasks (e.g., a getting-to-know-you activity) and more intellectually demanding tasks (e.g., a creativity exercise) influenced how loudly people spoke. This suggests that testing such sidetone effects in the typical read-aloud setting is insufficient for generalizing to more interactive, communication tasks. We conclude that MRP application support must reach beyond the time honored audio-only technologies to solve the problem of excessive speaker loudness. Figure 1: Remote pilot (left) interacts with a local (right) via an Internet-connected mobile remotepresence (MRP) system, which is the pilot's physical 'avatar.' Problem: The pilots tend to speak too loudly, which threatens acceptance of the technology.

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