Exploring the role of robots in home organization

Abstract

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.

The Robot Management System: A Framework for Conducting Human-Robot Interaction Studies Through Crowdsourcing

“…Within the field of HRI, convincing research is typically strongly supported by user studies to help prove the effectiveness of new techniques (Lee et al, 2012;Cakmak & Thomaz, 2012;Kahn et al, 2012;Pantofaru, Takayama, Foote, & Soto, 2012;Morales Saiki et al, 2012). Integration of user studies into the design, development and evaluation of new techniques has been shown to result in more useable methods (Suay, Toris, & Chernova, 2012), whereas development of algorithms in isolation risks biasing usability towards expert users.…”

Ranger, An Example of Integration of Robotics into the Home Ecosystem

“…This situation confirms what Takayama et al [19] found: "people would feel more positively toward robots doing occupations with people rather than in place of people". Transposing this approach to homes for a use with children, we developed a robot to help tidying-up the children's room, which has been considered as an interesting task by previous studies [3,4].…”

“…Only 13% of the European citizen think robots should be applied in priority to "domestic use, such as cleaning". Also among researchers it has not been clear what a robot exactly should do in homes [3]. Pantofaru et al [3] explored the role of robots in home organization (tidying, storing), and found that robots could have a potentially high impact on this.…”

“…Also among researchers it has not been clear what a robot exactly should do in homes [3]. Pantofaru et al [3] explored the role of robots in home organization (tidying, storing), and found that robots could have a potentially high impact on this. Similarly, Bell et al [4] suggest that robots could be used in tidying up scenarios in the domestic environment.…”

Towards a comprehensive chore list for domestic robots

“…To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. enumerating tasks include ICF (International Classification of Functioning) [2], ADL (Activities of Daily Living) [5], interviews with people in their homes [4] and surveys [6].…”