A Human-Centered Pattern Approach to Comprehensible and Pleasant Behavioral Expressions for Social Robots

To make robots acceptable in social contexts, we do not only have to improve their safety and technical skills, but also need to design an intuitive and pleasant interaction and robot behavior that is in congruence with the users’ expectations. This thesis investigates how the concept of behavioral patterns can be employed to facilitate and standardize human-robot interaction (HRI) design and create social robot applications with a high user experience and acceptance. The developed approach contains five components: a design process and tools to develop reusable robot behavioral expressions, a pattern notation format to document the behavioral expression, a pattern language that describes the relations between patterns, a pattern wiki to make the developed patterns available to the HRI community, and a software development kit to support the implementation on specific robotic platforms. The practical application, usefulness and quality of the approach is evaluated using three evaluation methods: demonstration based on an example use case, an empirical study with potential end users, and a second empirical study with HRI practitioners.