In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments

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This paper describes a method for formative evaluation of the user experience based on the user experience model of Hassenzahl [11]. It captures positive and negative feelings during the exploration of an interactive product. In a subsequent retrospective interview phase users indicate for each instance of a positive or negative feeling the product design aspects inducing it. This phase further employs the laddering interview technique [24] to reveal the meaning of product design aspects to the user and the underlying fulfilled or frustrated needs. The generated information helps designers to understand and optimize the user experience potential of a product.

This paper investigates the suitability of visualizing global 3D environment maps generated from RGB-D sensor data in teleoperation user interfaces for service robots. We carried out a controlled experiment involving 27 participants, four teleoperation tasks, and two types of novel global 3D mapping techniques. Results show substantial advantages of global 3D mapping over a control condition for three of the four tasks. Global 3D mapping in the user interface lead to reduced search times for objects and to fewer collisions. In most situations it also resulted in less operator workload, higher situation awareness, and higher accuracy of operators' mental models of the remote environment.