Open All Senses

Accessible Multimodal Telepresence Robots in Social Spaces

Telepresence robots are mobile robots that enable people to access and navigate within remote spaces. These robots are increasingly being introduced into our everyday social and work lives and this brings forth challenges around acceptance, safety and trustworthiness. Open All Senses will explore people’s feelings of safety and comfort when controlling and interacting with telepresence robots and will provide opportunities for transforming their design and utility.

In order to understand the use of telepresence robots in different contexts, the project will create mock-ups of a nursing home and a museum – to simulate real world environments. Robots will be adapted with physical affordances and interaction modalities to prototype a concept for physically enabled telepresence. Studying and evaluating these technologies in stimulated settings will extend research into real-world environments, providing insight into users’ perceptions of trust towards, including access, functionality, safety, privacy, reliability and quality of interactions

Start date 1 June 2022 – 31^st May 2023

Introduction blog, mid blog, final blog

Research into this area will continue through the UK-RAS Networks Robotic and Autonomous Systems project ‘Principles of Learning from Unstructured Human-Robot Interactions‘.

Outputs:

Paper: ‘Somabotics Toolking for Rapid Prototyping Human-Robot Interaction Experiences using Wearable Haptics’

This project sits with Horizon’s Agile programme (Round 2)