Human-Robot Interaction in Public and Smart Spaces

We have developed a “network robot system” framework with the objective of enabling practical deployment of social robots to provide real-world services in everyday social environments. This framework addresses practical issues in social human-robot interaction by integrating ambient intelligence systems, networked data stores, human supervisors, and centralized planning. All of the elements of the system have been developed and tested in public and commercial spaces such as shopping malls, resulting in a flexible robot control architecture based on practical, real-world requirements. We describe several elements of the system and demonstrate examples of its use in five years of real-world field deployments and research. Finally, we present the Ubiquitous Network Robot Platform (UNR-PF), an internationally-standardized high-level architecture for service robots based on our framework.