Design principles for robot inclusive spaces: A case study with Roomba

Research focus on service robots that deals with applications related to healthcare, logistics, residential, search and rescue are gaining significant momentum in the recent years. Their social and economic relevance is more than evident. Yet, while much has been researched about “designing robots” focusing on sensing, actuation, mobility and control of service robots, little work has been done on “design for robots” that looks at designing preferred artefacts or environments for such robots. In this work, we propose a new philosophy of robot inclusive spaces, a cross disciplinary approach that brings together roboticians, architects and designers to solve numerous unsettled research problems in robotics community through design of inclusive interior spaces for robots where the latter live and operate. With a residential floor cleaning robot as a case study, we inductively derived a set of four design principles namely observability, accessibility, activity and safety that guides the realization of an inclusive space for these service robots. Also, the suggested principles are further defined, analysed and validated for their merits in this paper.

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